The story of Set-It-Off begins with Francesca Sutton, better known as ‘Frankie‘, working her job as a bank teller when tragedy strikes her. She becomes the victim of a bank robbery that leaves a woman dead and the blame positioned on her because she was acquainted with one of the criminals. After being told to ‘follow the protocol’ no matter what, she angrily leaves the bank after being fired for suspected collusion. 

While she’s recovering from her situation, she discusses it with her other friends, the main characters of ‘Set-It-Off’ itself. Stony, Cleo, and T.T, who are all working a minimum-wage janitorial job with an extremely rude owner, Luther. They initially joke about committing bank robberies, but do not have the current motivation to go through with it. Cleo is a risk-taker who would do anything to support her friends, while Frankie is still deeply bitter over how the police handled her situation. While they grapple over the decision, Stony sells herself to pay for her brother’s college tuition, who is sadly not accepted from his college of choice. To make matters worse, her brother is falsely suspected of involvement with the original bank robbery and is mistakenly gunned down by the police. Stony is heartbroken and resolves to leave her current situation, but needs money to do so.

T.T.’s motivation comes from the mistake of not keeping a keen eye on her son. While nobody was looking, he accidentally drank some cleaning detergent and is swiftly taken away by Child Protective Services. To make matters worse, she needs money to be able to see him again. Money that could only be obtained fast illegally, so T.T. and  join the robbery plan. While the girls begin to enact their plan, Stony becomes closely acquainted with a bank manager named Keith, and they start dating. However, this provides a conflict for her when the girls begin to go on a spree of successful bank robberies. Although, T.T. is still very apprehensive and runs during the first bank robbery they do. Despite their success during the robberies, they face other setbacks such as their former boss Luther stealing their money, which leads to T.T, Frankie, and Cleo hunting him down for it. T.T kills Luther to save Cleo, and Cleo herself takes the blame for it but manages to evade arrest because the witness was intimidated into silence.

Tensions revolving around the girls facing prison rise as the authorities begin pinpointing the connection between the girls, and the pressure pushes them to going through with robbing the biggest bank in town. As they drive, Stony warns her boyfriend Keith to leave the premises under the guise of a dinner date to save his life. During the robbery, everything goes fine until they are stopped by the same police detective that accused Frankie of collusion. With a new mindset, he tries his hardest to prevent any casualties during the robbery. However, a security guard fires at T.T. and wounds her. Cleo fires at the police out of rage as the girls flee the bank robbery in a car, now in a desperate attempt to escape the eyes of the law.

T.T tragically dies from her injuries, yet the girls hardly have time to mourn their loss. As all of them begin fleeing from the police, Cleo forms a plan to give Stony and Frankie a chance to escape. She makes them exit the getaway vehicle and charges forward to get most of the police force’s attention. As her tires are shot out, she takes a moment to light a cigarette before accepting that she wasn’t going to jail. Cleo exits the vehicle and enters a final shootout, being gunned down where she stood as a meaningful sacrifice for her surviving friends.

As Stony disguises herself and blends in with a group of people boarding a bus, Frankie is caught by the police officer who makes a final attempt to save her life. However, she holds a gun to his head and repeats what she told him during the start of it all, “What’s the procedure when you have a gun to your head?!“. She exclaims this before turning around to run, being gunned down as well. As Stony watches in tears, the police captain spots her, but lets her go because of the guilt he feels because of how preventable the situation was.

After Stony flees to Mexico, she calls Keith to inform him that she’s alive. After hanging up, she reminisces about the good times she had with her friends before driving off into the mountains with her share of the money. 

The neighborhood itself has higher potential for crime due to the people living inside of it. When Stony is walking alongside someone she knew to try and get money for her brother’s college tuition, the buildings around are often rundown and do not appear to be very kept together. A big part of why neighborhoods can lend itself to crime is due to the people inside of it. Two scenes come to mind regarding this.

The first scene is when the police officer and Frankie are talking following the first bank robbery that started it all. She says she knew the perpetrator from the neighborhood, and he had accomplices as well assisting him during it. His actions resulted in Frankie being fired, thus increasing the chances of the following bank robberies occurring. The second scene is when Cleo, T.T, and Stony’s boss harshly reprimands them for simply doing their job. Because it is shown that their boss is willing to steal from them later, his nature would’ve pushed the girls into pursuing riskier ways of making money to avoid working under him.