Men at Work (1990)

When Hollywood stars have said, ''Actually, I'd like to direct,'' it's doubtful any of them were aiming as low as Emilio Estevez. In the bottom-of-the-garbage-barrel comedy Men at Work, the second film written and directed by the esteemed auteur (the first was the oxymoronically entitled Wisdom), Estevez and his brother Charlie Sheen play Southern California sanitation engineers who discover a dead body along one of their routes. In a few of the early scenes, the two get a likable deadpan rhythm going. But most of the gags are terrible, and they hinge on overly familiar gimmicks: Estevez and Sheen dragging the corpse around as though it were still alive; Estevez peeping into the apartment across the street as Sheen makes time with the beautiful woman (Leslie Hope) who lives there. In other words, the movie rips off last summer's Weekend at Bernie's (one of the worst comedies ever made) and 1987's Stakeout, the lively hit that costarred...Emilio Estevez. Hey, if you're going to steal, why be subtle about it? D-

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