The movie takes place as two parallel plots separated by several years: Moore is an engineer developing a targeting system on a tank for the United States Army and Murphy is an American tank commander who finds himself forced to use the vehicle years later when Iraq invades Kuwait (an unintentional foreshadowing of the Gulf War that occurred seven years after the release of the film).

The protagonists never interact in any way throughout the film. However a cut scene showed both Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy together, but was edited out from the final film.

The film progresses as the indifferent and incompetent Moore slowly becomes more and more conscientious as he sees his corrupt employer falsifying test results on the notoriously unreliable system. This is interwoven with clips of the reluctant Murphy being forced into combat with a pair of ill trained Kuwaiti crewmen and the lemon of a tank (the machine gun falls apart in Murphy's hands, etc).

The film reaches its climax when Murphy attempts to fire the main gun, which jams due to an overheated component ("The WAM's overheating! The WAM's overheating! What the Hell is a WAM!?!"). Flashbacks then show the reformed Moore ignoring his bosses' orders to cut costs and making a sound engineering change to fix an anticipated overheating problem in the component ("Damn it, something on this tank is going to work!"). The camera cuts away to the tank's innards, showing Moore's fan turning on and cooling the component, and the AA rockets getting launched to save Murphy from an Iraqi anti-tank helicopter. The film ends with Moore and Murphy as heroes in their respective jobs.

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