**
Cast: John Cusack, Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, Angelina Jolie
Director: Mike Newell
Rating: M
Review: Russell Baillie
On take-off it looks intriguing: a story set against the stress junkie lives of New York air-traffic controllers, with a strong cast and a director who has previously turned meditations on men under pressure into
fine movies.
By landing time, however, Pushing Tin's character-driven story has only flown in ever-decreasing circles.
Sure, it has told nervous fliers a few things they possibly wouldn't want to know about how the traffic cops of the world's busiest airspace go about their fast-talking point duty and the mindset that goes with it. It's a place where "control freak" is a high compliment.
But it soon becomes unsatisfying - all the more so because of its promising premise - with its mix of offbeat humour, soapy domestic drama and go-nowhere plot.
Cusack is motor-mouth ace controller Nick Falzone, one of a hardcase crew whose working day means guiding up to 7000 planes in and out of New York's three major and many minor airports.
The pressure never gets to him. Until, that is, the arrival of new boy Russell Bell (Thornton), a steely nerved controller of Zen-like disposition. Bell's eye-catching wife Mary (Jolie) adds to the macho rivalry which develops between the pair.
That threatens both Falzone's apparent domestic bliss with wife Connie (Aussie Blanchett scarily convincing as a Long Island wife) and his concentration in front of the radar screen.
A few crises are thrown in for good measure, which add to the feel that this has an episodic script better suited to a small-screen series.
Despite Cusack's typically nervy central performance and our look into a contender for the world's most intense workplace, Pushing Tin just doesn't stack up.
