Movies Like Target Number One
If you loved Target Number One's Thriller and Crime storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks
Veronica Guerin
In this true story, Veronica Guerin is an investigative reporter for an Irish newspaper. As the drug trade begins to bleed into the mainstream, Guerin decides to take on and expose those responsible. Beginning at the bottom with addicts, Guerin then gets in touch with John Traynor, a paranoid informant. Not without some prodding, Traynor leads her to John Gilligan, the ruthless head of the operation, who does not take kindly to Guerin's nosing.
Brokedown Palace
Best friends Alice and Darlene take a trip to Thailand after graduating high school. In Thailand, they meet a captivating Australian man, who calls himself Nick Parks. Darlene is particularly smitten with Nick and convinces Alice to take Nick up on his offer to treat the two of them to what amounts to a day trip to Hong Kong. In the airport, the girls are seized by the police and shocked to discover that one of their bags contains heroin.
A Prayer Before Dawn
The amazing true story of Billy Moore, an English boxer incarcerated in Thailand’s most notorious prison. Thrown into a world of drugs and violence, he finds his best chance to escape is to fight his way out in prison Muay Thai tournaments.
White Boy Rick
The story of Richard Wershe Jr., a teenager who became an undercover informant for the police during the 1980s, and was ultimately arrested for drug trafficking and sentenced to life in prison.
The Baker
A quiet, stoic man, lives a monk-like existence in self-imposed exile. When his estranged son is killed in a drug deal gone bad, he is left to look after a granddaughter he never knew existed, and he is forced back into a life he tried to put behind him.
Skin Trade
After his family is killed by a Serbian gangster with international interests. NYC detective Nick goes to S.E. Asia and teams up with a Thai detective to get revenge and destroy the syndicates human trafficking network.
Blow
A boy named George Jung grows up in a struggling family in the 1950's. His mother nags at her husband as he is trying to make a living for the family. It is finally revealed that George's father cannot make a living and the family goes bankrupt. George does not want the same thing to happen to him, and his friend Tuna, in the 1960's, suggests that he deal marijuana. He is a big hit in California in the 1960's, yet he goes to jail, where he finds out about the wonders of cocaine. As a result, when released, he gets rich by bringing cocaine to America. However, he soon pays the price.
Snitch
Construction company owner John Matthews learns that his estranged son, Jason, has been arrested for drug trafficking. Facing an unjust prison sentence for a first time offender courtesy of mandatory minimum sentence laws, Jason has nothing to offer for leniency in good conscience. Desperately, John convinces the DEA and the opportunistic DA Joanne Keeghan to let him go undercover to help make arrests big enough to free his son in return. With the unwitting help of an ex-con employee, John enters the narcotics underworld where every move could be his last in an operation that will demand all his resources, wits and courage to survive.
More Movies Like Target Number One
Layer Cake
When a seemingly straight-forward drug deal goes awry, XXXX has to break his die-hard rules and turn up the heat, not only to outwit the old regime and come out on top, but to save his own skin...
Kill the Messenger
A reporter becomes the target of a vicious smear campaign that drives him to the point of suicide after he exposes the CIA's role in arming Contra rebels in Nicaragua and importing cocaine into California. Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb.
The System
When a young soldier, newly returned from war, gets caught up in a drug bust, he is recruited by the authorities to go undercover in a notoriously dangerous prison in order to figure out what is really going on.
American Gangster
Loosely based on the criminal career of Frank Lucas, a gangster from La Grange, North Carolina, who smuggled heroin into the United States on American service planes returning from the Vietnam War, before being detained by a task force led by Newark Detective Richie Roberts.
American Made
The true story of pilot Barry Seal, who transported contraband for the CIA and the Medellin cartel in the 1980s.
An Innocent Man
Jimmie Rainwood was minding his own business when two corrupt police officers (getting an address wrong) burst into his house, expecting to find a major drug dealer. Rainwood is shot, and the officers frame him as a drug dealer. Rainwood is convicted of drug dealing, based on the perjured evidence of a police informant. Thrown into a seedy jail, fighting to prove his innocence is diffucult when he has to deal with the realities of prison life, where everyone claims they were framed.
The Infiltrator
A U.S Customs official uncovers a massive money laundering scheme involving Pablo Escobar.
Above Suspicion
The chilling true story of a newly married FBI poster boy assigned to an Appalachian mountain town in Kentucky. There he is drawn into an illicit affair with an impoverished local woman who becomes his star informant. She sees in him her means of escape; instead, it's a ticket to disaster for both of them.
Who'll Stop the Rain
John, a disillusioned Vietnam War journalist, turns to heroin smuggling. He cons Ray, an equally burnt out veteran into delivering the drugs stateside to his wife. Everything soon falls apart and Ray ends up on the run with John's wife trying to evade crooked narcotics agents.
The Mule
Earl Stone, a man in his eighties, is broke, alone, and facing foreclosure of his business when he is offered a job that simply requires him to drive. Easy enough, but, unbeknownst to Earl, he's just signed on as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel. He does so well that his cargo increases exponentially, and Earl hit the radar of hard-charging DEA agent Colin Bates.
Crisis
Three stories about the world of opioids collide: a drug trafficker arranges a multi-cartel Fentanyl smuggling operation between Canada and the U.S., an architect recovering from an OxyContin addiction tracks down the truth behind her son's involvement with narcotics, and a university professor battles unexpected revelations about his research employer, a drug company with deep government influence bringing a new "non-addictive" painkiller to market.
Empire
Big time drug dealer Victor Rosa is looking to get out of the game and sees his chance with a big deal with a new friend who happens to be a Wall St. stockbroker. Thinking this will be his chance to go out on top, Victor soon finds out that he's been double crossed and his last option is to get revenge.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Target Number One (2020): Thriller and Crime themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of Target Number One.
See full details for Target Number One (2020)