One of my dearest friends wanted
to see this, and I, despite my misgivings about the previews, said sure. An
hour and 15 minutes into it there still was no discernible plot, but there was
some implausible testosteronic match-o stuff with free throws, driving and
adultery. Whee.
This is the first movie I have ever known her to walk
out of in 15 years of moviegoing. We even sat through
The Avengers, which just got laughably worse
and worse to excruciatingly awful. At least we could see that it was going
somewhere. Pushing Tin is lukewarm, tepid, milktoast. An interesting thing
about the title; it anagrams to "Hung in Spit".
Billy Bob Thornton
(tremendously talented actor/writer/director) plays Russell Bell; a half breed
outsider motorcycling folding-chair scope-wizard with a feather
in his hair for chrissakes,who "don't say much", a big black
motorcycle twixt his legs and a "too pretty" first wife, Mary Bell
(Angelina Jolie). John Cusack (so good in Grosse Pointe Blank), is Nick
"The Zone" Falzone, the defacto head of the controllers' clique; the
best dang controller in the whole dang - you get the idea. There isn't enough
tension between these characters to run a string-can telephone.
You get the awful,
creeping sensation that someone is going to teach somebody something sometime
before the end, somehow. Anyway, that's what the preview inferred. And the E!
"The Making of Pushing Tin" (which I watched out of a sense of
fairness after I went to the film) re-iterated that inferrence.
The "special", which is not a bad marketing device in itself in
general (it made me sort of want to see the film even though I
knew I hated it) , kept referring to these air traffic controllers as
Jet Jockeys!, trying to make them sound exciting. Cruise was a Jet Jockey in
Top Gun. I don't know Tom Cruise, but these guys are no Tom Cruises. The
"special" also hit the idea that this was a comedy over and over and
over, but not one of the stars saying that looked like they believed it
was. Hell, just say it enough, we'll all believe it.
Pushing Tin has a kind
of stupid westerny feel to it, but alas, no one is shooting. And the only
Indian is also half cowboy, which makes do for internal conflicts, I guess.
Actors fall predictably into bed, prattle on disinterestedly, and show off
their mental skills like some Dune-bound Mentats on green scope-juice.
We are impressed when
Falzone confounds the waitress and holds all of their menu orders in his head?
Have those guys not been ordering the same breakfast every morning? Some trick.
And he throws all that in the chef's face - who is barely capable of
comprehending him. If the chef had merely said offhandedly, "Yeah. Same as
always.", or even just rattled it back perfectly, or offered him his old
waiter job back,that would have been funny. And lightened it up a
little. And maybe let us into the character a little. But touches like that are
few and far between in this holding-pattern nightmare...
Russell Bell's
air-controller claim to fame is? - he let a plane fly over him on a runway to
experience turbulence. So Thornton's character is a freak. What else is new.
Maybe if he'd just slung a tater into the engine he could have had julienne
fries...
Russell Bell's wife is a
misfit and seems to be present only to give Falzone something to do while
his wife is at the art class (Naked men in week 3, oh boy.) All the
other wives act like rejects from Married To The Mob. What is with this grating
nasally stock-in-trade suburban whiner set - classless, uneducated, jaded and
coy? Please air-freight in some new stereotypes for us.
How will Falzone impress
Russell Bell? Falzone drives recklessly to the donut shop, That will do
it. Ah, but Russell Bell is soooooo cool, he sleeps in the suicide/co-pilot's
seat, blissfully unaware...Drat! Wait! He is awake! At the light,
Russell Bell jams his foot onto the accelerator, so Falzone has to scramble to
miss cars. Blech. And the horror of it all, they fight, and pout, and puff up
their feather(s) while on the job, like that could ever really happen in a
traffic control situation. (note: If any ATC's do that really, at any time for
any reason, they need to be fired. Right then. We are not talking about
camaraderie, or good natured fun. They are exhibiting vicious in-fighting at
the controls.)
So Falzone can talk fast.
Lost interest in about the first ten minutes. Get that guy from the old package
service ads. He can talk fast too. And can Bell-y-Bob shoot one more free throw
than Falzone? Excuse me. The suspense was killing me. I won't spoil how that
ends for you.
The best thing I liked in the movie,
where it was interesting, (of what I saw), was a 3-D tracking of the flights,
where we saw Falzone go into the scope in his head. This film could have used a
counter point narrative by Falzone to pull us along, make us care about the
main character, and show how his self destructiveness goes against his
intentions. At least that way we could like this guy a little. And Cusack can
be so freakin' charming.
We walked out 1:15 into it, with an hour to go,
right after the adultery scene when the two couples ended up next to each other
in a restaurant. Pointless, embarrassing scene. Like the one prior to it where
Nick jokingly "confesses" to his wife that he had a hot date with
Mary Bell, to throw her off the scent. Literally. Uncomfortable, to say the
least. And he still had not grabbed that damned feather. Anyway, I'm sure I
know how the film ends, because the previews showed both of them on a runway,
holding hands, and later both apparently alive after being sucked up in the
wake. The wake should be for the film.
