Beware the Trash Men

I honestly don’t know why I remember this film. No one really discusses Men at Work, the 1990 film comedy written, directed, and starring Emilio Estevez, at this point. It wasn’t a huge success when it came out, making on $16.2 Mil against a $9 Mil budget (which wasn’t enough, even by Hollywood math of the time, to make it more than a light flop), and it was sent to cable movie hell soon after its release. Estevez would go on to make far better movies, and Men at Work was mostly remembered for sharing a name with a completely unrelated Australian band (who were far more popular).

And yet, I remember the film. I remember watching it more than once when it was on cable back in the early 1990s. I thought the movie was amusing. This is more a comment on the fact that kids are stupid, and I was a stupid kid. A fun, silly film about trash guys getting in over their head while a criminal conspiracy happens around them isn’t exactly a film anyone was going to care about, but when you’re channel surfing cable television in the middle of the afternoon, just about anything is going to seem good.

Men at Work isn’t a good film, though. It’s a generally amiable movie with some amusing moments, but it never really finds a way to gel all its elements together. You’re never really sure if it wants to be a lighthearted comedy or a darker commentary on corporate greed and environmentalism. You’re never sure if it wants you to like its main characters or hate them. You’re never sure if the film even knows how to be a film most of the time. For a kid watching a random flick back in 1990 the movie was amusing, but going back to it now I have to wonder why anyone thought this was a film worthy of greenlighting at all. It’s really bad.

Estevez stars alongside his brother, Charlie Sheen, as James St. James and Carl Taylor, respectively. They’re two trash men working in the California town of Las Playas, but they have bigger dreams. Being trash men is just a hold over for them; what they really want to do is open up their own surf shop. That is if they could get a plan together for how to build it, a team together to run it, or even a loan to fund it all. So they keep dreaming, waiting for the right moment to grab their big break.

They’re also terrible at their jobs. Loud, rude, and lazy, they get a ton of complaints about their work. That’s why they’re put on probation and given a ride-along manager in the form of Louis Fedders (Keith David). While on their route they discover a body, Jack Berger (Darrell Larson), a local politician running for reelection. He’s also a man that Carl shot in the ass with a pellet gun the night before when Carl saw Jack pushing around a woman, Susan Wilkins (Leslie Hope), in her apartment. As it turns out, Susan took a tape that Jack had made of rich industrialist Maxwell Potterdam III (John Getz) confessing to polluting the local stretch of ocean with chemical waste. Jack needed the tape, Maxwell wanted the tape, and Maxwell’s goons killed Jack for the tape. Now, with a body in their hands, and no clue what to do with him, Carl and James are wrapped up in the whole affair and have to find a way to break the conspiracy and get free of it all.

Men at Work has a lot of moving parts. Frankly it has too many moving parts, most of which don’t fit together at all. There’s the conspiracy story about Jack, Susan, and Maxwell, which forms the meat of the movie, but this storyline is almost completely unrelated to James and Carl. If Carl hadn’t shot Jack in the butt with a pellet gun, and then if James and Carl hadn’t found the body in a can afterwards, they’d have no reason to get involved in the rest of the story. When you build your whole film around one storyline and then have to strain to fit your main characters into the main plot, there’s a serious problem going on.

Part of the issue is that James and Carl really aren’t great guys for this story. The plot is about industrial waste, political machinations, and murder, but James and Carl don’t really care about any of this. Carl is kind of interested in Susan, who he’s been lightly stalking for the last few months from across the street, but generally speaking they aren’t political guys and they don’t care what happens in the town around them. They’re surfers forced to work as trash men, and they really don’t seem to give a rats ass about anything else.

It would honestly be better for the story if one, or both, of the guys had any connection to any of the characters. If Carl, for instance, was Susan’s ex-boyfriend instead of her creepy neighbor, that would certainly help things. Then he’d have a reason to get involved again when dudes were coming after Susan for a tape she had. Doubly so if Jack were Susan’s current beau instead of just her employer. Then Carl finding the body would put extra suspicion on him and would give reasons for our two trash men to take the body with them (which they do in the main movie) and keep it hidden so they can figure out what to do next. Cracking the mystery of Jack’s death then has personal stakes for these guys and makes their involvement in the movie make actual sense.

The film really doesn’t know what to do with these two slackers. They talk about opening a surf shop but then never bring it up again for the rest of the film. Having that be their goal in life, which they mention as a means of character development, should then lead to them, somehow, finding a way to take the lessons they learn during this fiasco and motivate themselves to open their surf shop. But that’s never brought up, so why is the surf shop mentioned at all?

Similarly, the plot is all about how Maxwell is dumping chemicals illegally. You’d think that would lead, at some point, to the police showing up and Maxwell being taken away in handcuffs for his crimes. That doesn’t happen, though. Instead the two guys pull some pranks on him and dump him into some waste sludge, which makes him all wet and grumpy. The film ends there, as if that’s enough punishment for this yuppie asshole. No real punishment is served, and no lessons are learned. This despite just how much trouble Carl and James should be in.

Notably they still have a dead body with their fingerprints all over it. Oh, and at the instigation of their ride-along, Louis, they also kidnap a pizza guy (Dean Cameron) who stumbles onto their hijinx. And, to get into Maxwell’s factory they drive their trash truck through the gates, crashing it. There are real, severe consequences that these guys should face for everything they get up to. But the film doesn’t address any of that. After pulling some pranks it fades out as if saying, “oh, they’re just a couple of scamps,” and that’s it.

Nothing about this film really works. Even with Estevez’s decent hand as a director, and the two brothers playing charismatic leads for the film, Men at Work simply doesn’t come together at all. It’s an amiable enough film in the moment, but it doesn’t have nearly enough laughs to paper over all the plotholes and misdeeds that make up this movie. It’s a messy, sloppy film that barely holds together at all, and you have to wonder why any studio head saw this script and said, “yes, this will be a hit.” It wasn’t, and for good reason.