Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez are garbagemen who get tangled up in the murder of a political candidate, and, I don't want to say they solve the mystery of who killed the man and why. More like they happen to be in the vicinity when those mysteries are solved.
They sort of try to solve it. Sheen goes to try and question the woman whose apartment the guy died in, but they end up on almost a date. Estevez and Keith David, who was assigned to supervise them for a couple of weeks because they've been doing a shitty job of collecting garbage, are supposed to tail Sheen, but that falls apart in minutes. They also bring along the corpse of the dead guy, plus a pizza delivery guy Keith David decides saw too much. What was it about movies in the late '80s - early '90s and people lugging around corpses while pretending they're still alive?
This is definitely a movie that feels stretched at 98 minutes. There's a whole running gag about two of Sheen and Estevez' coworkers trying to prank them in various ways. It just starts off as the pranks backfiring, but then you get to the point where they're accidentally blowing up the lady's car and purposefully tampering with the garbage truck's brakes. Isn't that attempted murder?
There's another running subplot with these two cops who like to hassle Sheen and Estevez. Keith David's character apparently went through some shit in 'Nam, so he ends up handcuffing the cops to a children's merry-go-round thing in doggy style. That takes those morons out of the plot, but the movie comes back a couple of times to make jokes about it looking like they're fucking.
At least the pair of idiot henchmen are relevant to the plot, as they lose the body of the guy they killed and have to locate both it and an incriminating tape they were supposed to recover. So there's a reason for us to listen to Biff give Mario grief about bringing a taser instead of a gun, or Mario to smack Biff for talking about Mario's mother.
I'm still not sure they actually won at the end. They dumped the bad guy into a pool of the toxic waste he was dumping in a landfill, but I'm not sure they have any evidence to connect him to the murder. The two morons that did it might have escaped where they were buried in trash, and he had taken the incriminating tape prior to that. If he had any sense, it's long destroyed. I guess humiliation (and maybe he can be charged with attempted murder for trying to crush them with a bulldozer) is punishment enough. Well, humiliation and cancer from landing in toxic waste. That's basically the death penalty in 1990.
This almost feels like it should have been a pilot for a syndicated TV show. Like Psych, but with two intelligent but immature garbagemen who find new mysteries to solve in the garbage each week!
2 comments:
Huh, I had no idea this existed. It sort of makes the "Ha! Here are the brothers on screen together for the first time!" joke in Loaded Weapon 1 less effective.
I don't know how I'd heard of it, but the only thing I knew going in was they played garbagemen, so I wasn't expecting a murder mystery, such as it was.
Post a Comment