“Pushing Tin?” More like “Pushing Crap.”

Who would have thought that any movie with John Cusack (“Con Air,” “Gross Pointe Blank”) and Billy Bob Thornton (“Sling Blade,” “A Simple Plan”) could be this bad.

I haven’t been this bored at a movie since I fell asleep during “Lawnmower Man II,” watching Matt Frewer prance around on screen trying to act like an insane genius.

I haven’t been this tempted to walk out of a movie since Jerry Lewis’s 1981 painfest “Hardly Working” destroyed the last of my innocence.

I haven’t been this fidgety in a flick since I squirmed through “Beverly Hills Cop III,” wedged between two former Iowa State football players with a jumbo Sprite and full bladder.

When you throw Cate Blanchett (“Elizabeth”) into this stanky mix, it transcends bad and becomes something bigger and badder: A mystery beyond the ken of normal man.

How could anyone screw up with this kind of talent on the screen?

What we have here is a movie with a weak premise anyway. It is a story about two highly competitive air traffic controllers played by Cusack and Thornton.

Cusack plays Nick Falzone, the hottest air traffic controller around. He can “push more tin” than any five controllers, and at one point, he’s got planes “lined up like Rockettes.”

Thornton plays Russell Bell, a hotshot cowboy controller from Denver who has just moved to New York to work in the big leagues. His quiet demeanor belies his competitive nature. It is this competitiveness that drives Falzone into breaking one of the cardinal rules among air traffic controllers: Never sleep with another controller’s wife.

In the first 30 minutes of the film, all of this posturing and nonsense is supposed to impress the audience as if we were watching all that macho male bonding crap in “Top Gun.”

The cool, hip and quirky “hey, we’re all a bunch of stressed out adrenaline junkies” stuff is kind of funny for a few minutes. Then, it’s yawn city, baby.

I’m sure that being an air traffic controller is a hard job with little glory and enough stress to kill normal people, but that still doesn’t make it a good subject for a movie that tries to come off hip. (No one cares about the peccadilloes, rituals and attitudes of air traffic controllers.)

Falzone feels like he’s won the contest after he nails Bell’s wife, and no one finds out about it.

Then, Mary Bell (Angelina Jolie) tells her husband. Bell does nothing to get revenge, but Falzone’s paranoia ruins his marriage.

Jolie is certainly a comely enough lass, but her performance was stiff and unsympathetic. Usually when an actress bawls on screen, you can expect a modicum of sympathy from the audience, even in a comedy.

She was so obviously doing an imitation of a crying woman that it was hard to understand how Cusack could pretend to care.

If you have time to think about these things while the movie is going on, you know you’re wasting your time. You will have plenty of time to think about all sorts of things, too. For example, aren’t we past the point of giving an actress’s nipples almost as much screen time as the actress herself?

I haven’t seen this kind of gratuitous, lingering nipple-gandering since “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

The only thing more boring than the contrived conflict between Falzone and Bell is the film’s contrived ending, which miraculously wraps everything up, leaving the audience with nothing to mull over. You won’t be going straight to the coffee shop after this one to discuss the shades of meaning; that’s for sure.

Without giving too much away, the emotionally distraught Falzone loses his ability to “push tin” and goes on a spiritual journey to reconstruct his life that lasts five minutes. Having done that, he quickly makes an attempt at bridge-building with his wife by singing to her in front of the cockpit crew of her airliner.

What happened to all that high pressure tin pushing, pal? I guess lives don’t matter when love is in the air.

This flick was an empty experience from start to finish.

1 star out of five

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs.