Men at Work (1990)
(On Cable TV, July 2020) There’s something very perfunctory to the dark comedy of Men at Work that makes the film far less distinctive than it wishes to be. It’s still special in that it brings together brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez as good friends involved in a murder thriller in small-town California. Garbagemen by profession but certainly not professionals by any means, our two heroes seem content to goof off all day long until they’re stuck with an observer on their daily routes, and accidentally find a murder victim. Things get wilder once their observer proves to be crazier than themselves, and the agents of the small-town conspiracy go looking for them. While the camaraderie between the two leads is exceptional, the rest of the film plays off familiar elements. Keith David gets increasingly funnier as his demeanour is stripped to its fundamentals, and Leslie Hope is eye-catching as the love interest. But much of Men at Work seems perfunctory in the way that very average circa-1990 comic thrillers could be, stuck between two decades’ very different aesthetics and not quite distinctive enough to be memorable. It’s still not a bad watch, but it’s far less memorable than I would have expected.
