Raunchy, R-Rated 90s Crime Comedy Proves Why Hiding A Body Should Be Left To The Pros

By Robert Scucci
| Published 19 seconds ago

When Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez’s names are brought up, nobody will blame you if you immediately think about Hot Shots! and The Mighty Ducks. But when the brothers teamed up for a crime comedy like 1990’s Men at Work, it’s easy to see why they were such popular comedic actors during the height of their careers. Men at Work benefits from its stars’ chemistry because, while they’re not portraying brothers on screen, they have the same kind of reluctant best friend energy siblings have, allowing every heightened situation they find themselves in to come off as grounded and believable, which is no easy feat when you learn just how stupid their situation is.

Men at Work wasn’t a huge financial success upon its initial release, earning $16.2 million at the box office against its reported production budget of $9 million. And even today, it’s far from a critical darling, presently boasting a 30 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and only a slightly better 44 percent audience score on the Popcornmeter. Like most crime comedies of this era, however, it holds up shockingly well because of how hard it sells its premise.

My running theory is that there were so many movies like this coming out at the same time that critics simply became jaded, and their fatigue can be seen in the numbers. But just like Fatal Instinct and National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 (another Emilio Estevez banger), you just need to be built for movies like Men at Work. Whether you are or not is entirely up to you, but if you’re going in blind and love a solid crime comedy, you really can’t go wrong here.

Two Garbage Men, A Dead Body, And A Toxic Waste Conspiracy

Men at Work centers on garbagemen Carl Taylor (Charlie Sheen) and James St. James (Emilio Estevez). Day to day, their lives are pretty simple. They collect garbage, make a total mess by throwing trash barrels all over the place, and recklessly drive their truck. Their behavior is so unprofessional that they’re placed on probation, forcing them to work under the observation of Louis Fedders (Keith David), their boss’s brother-in-law.

One day after work, Carl and James are hanging out at the former’s apartment when they feast their eyes on Susan Wilkins (Leslie Hope), the woman who lives in the apartment across the way who Carl clearly has the hots for. They witness her get into an altercation with the man in her apartment, which prompts Carl to shoot him in the butt with a pellet gun. The whole story turns into a convoluted murder plot as Carl and James hide beneath the window laughing when two men enter Susan’s apartment, strangle the man, drag his body out of the building, stuff the body into a toxic waste drum, and haphazardly place the drum into the trunk of their car.

The body, which is revealed to belong to City Councilman and mayoral candidate Jack Berger (Darrell Larson), is discovered the next day by Carl and James while running their route with Louis because the drum rolled out of the hitmen’s car and straight into a garbage pile sitting by the curb. Fortunately, Louis, who hates cops, is quick to point out that they didn’t actually kill the man with a pellet gun, but also brings up the fact that nobody knows this guy is missing yet, and they have to do something with the body before anybody finds out. 

While figuring out their next steps and waiting for the whole situation to blow over, they keep Jack’s body at Carl’s place, concealing his true identity with a Richard Nixon mask. It seems like a solid plan until a pizza man (Dean Cameron) shows up, making him a witness and prompting the gang to kidnap him so they don’t get thrown under the bus for a murder they didn’t commit.

Complicating matters further are hitmen Biff (Hawk Wolinski) and Mario (John Lavachielli), who are scrambling to find the politician’s body after failing to properly dispose of it, and officer Mike (John Putch), who is pretty much harmless but, for some reason, has always had it out for Carl and James.

Sibling Energy Steals The Show

On paper, Men at Work is a near-perfect comedy of errors, which is then elevated by the chemistry between Sheen and Estevez. The entire situation Carl and James find themselves in is so out to lunch that you need two charismatic leads to actually sell it, which they do in spades. The situational humor alone is enough to keep your eyes glued to the screen, waiting for the next big mishap, but it’s the stolen glances between Carl and James that add a whole new layer of charm to the equation. It feels like two brothers way in over their heads after getting caught in the middle of an assassination plot, when all they want to do is go to work, come home, crack open a few brews, and watch some TV.

As Men at Work barrels into its second and third acts, we get a tight story about political corruption, and how working class men with no clue how much trouble they’re getting into can rise to the occasion and become heroes in their own right, when all they really want to do at the end of the day is go back to their slacker lifestyle and forget any of this ever happened.

If you’re looking for a solid, forgotten comedy of errors that may have been railed on a little too hard by the critics when it was first making its rounds, you can stream Men at Work for free on Tubi as of this writing.