Like Freud's understanding of women, Pushing Tin is most noted for its lacks. Despite all its promise and flair, there’s no plot.

The opening credits indicate that the film is based on an article by Darcy Frey and I bet it's a good one. Besides rumors that air traffic control is the most stressful career outside dentistry, little popular culture time has been given to the blokes who get us on the ground in one piece.

I love the edginess of this movie–it gives you yet one more thing to worry about when flying. Forget the age of the plane, forget the pilot’s ability to fly blind, forget wind sheer, worry about whether the air traffic controllers are actually doing their job instead of rolling around on the floor punching the innards out of each other to ascertain who’s the better man.

So the film's content is quite appealing. But writers Glen and Les Charles, who brought us MASH and Cheers, were seemingly left to tease a story out a concept, and foolishly fall back on the old king of the roost phobia. It's a tried and true notion, of course,--children chant it--"I'm the king of the castle and you're the dirty rascal" and Australians sing about it in "Click Goes the Shears." In jobs where vanity is everything, there can only be one ringer, one head honcho, one man who shines above the rest.

In "Pushing Tin" the two men desperate to be top dog are John Cusack as Nick Falzone and Billy Bob Thornton as Russell Bell. Both know how to act, and both know how to get the planes lined up in the sky and on the ground without mishap. That's what they do and they do it well. There's some nice imagery as Nick envisons the planes like a video game that he plays with perfection. Russell is a tad more edgy, lining the planes up so tightly the others are afraid. But he knows his job, he pushes tin.

Okay, we got the setting, we got the players. Now just a plot and we’ve got a movie.

Unfortunately it doesn’t happen. Instead, Nick cuckolds Russell who suddenly becomes a philosopher amid a most improbable tangle of illogical events that leave a sad after-taste.

Director Mike Newell brought us the hugely entertaining "Four Weddings and a Funeral." In "Pushing Tin" no-one gets married and the only funeral is yours if you’re foolish enough to see this movie.