Men at Work(1990)

SHORT VERSION:
Thanks to the combined efforts of Carl, James, Louis, Susan, and a pizza delivery man that Louis had earlier kidnapped, they get the better of Potterdam and his workers at the Las Playas Landfill and send Potterdam into a small lake that the workers have just contaminated with toxic waste from his ChemLife plant. We don’t see what becomes of him afterward, but we are left to assume that the good guys brought Potterdam to justice and exposed his illegal toxic waste dumping practices by delivering a tape to the police that Jack Berger made before he was killed that recorded his and Potterdam’s roles in the scheme.

LONG VERSION:
After Carl (Charlie Sheen), James (Emilio Estevez), and Louis (Keith David) find the body of Jack Berger (Darrell Larson) in an oil drum during their garbage route and determine that his death was caused by strangulation, James wants to go to the police about it, but Louis shoots down that idea, due to his hatred of cops, and they end up taking the body with them back to their garbage company’s headquarters and hide it. Later on, Carl suggests to James that Susan (Leslie Hope) – Berger’s campaign manager who lives in the apartment building across from Carl and James’ apartment (and whom Carl has a crush on and has also been spying on for the past six weeks) – must have been the one who killed Jack since they last saw her arguing with him in her apartment (though they did not see her step out of her apartment after the argument ended to retrieve Berger’s cassette tape from her car that contains a recording that Berger made of himself and Potterdam [John Getz] revealing them both to be in on the illegal offshore dumping of toxic waste from Potterdam’s ChemLife plant, nor did they see Potterdam’s top henchmen, Biff [Hawk Wolinski] and Mario [John Lavachielli], confront and strangle Berger in the apartment moments after she left and then take his body away), and he feels that they must investigate her.

That night, Carl, James, and Louis are seen in Carl’s and James’ apartment with Jack’s body sitting in a chair and wearing a Richard Nixon mask, and after they phone order a pizza for dinner, James puts Jack’s corpse in the bathroom so he isn’t so visible. Soon after, Louis sees Susan entering her apartment and alerts Carl and James about it, and Carl ultimately decides to go over to her apartment and figure out a way inside so he can snoop around for evidence while James and Louis decide to keep watch of him from the window with Louis toting Carl’s pellet rifle. Carl gets inside the apartment building, but just as he creeps up to Susan’s door, she suddenly comes out intending to get rid of some trash, and they startle each other so much that Carl trips over his own feet and falls to the floor. Carl introduces himself to her as Ted Blanston III and claims to have lived in this apartment for the last five years but leads a very private life, hence why she has never seen him, and he manipulates her into letting him come into her apartment by claiming that he hurt his ankle falling down and needs to put some ice on it. He conducts small searches of her apartment in moments where she is distracted, but finds nothing proving her guilt, and they wind up hitting it off and have some drinks together. Meanwhile, a pizza delivery man (credited as “Pizza Man”) (Dean Cameron) shows up at James’ apartment with the pizza, but he catches James moving Jack’s corpse out of the bathroom so he can urinate privately, prompting Louis to take him hostage and bind and gag him because he feels that he has seen too much. Meanwhile, Potterdam telephones Biff and Mario, and after he chews them out for losing both Jack’s body and the tape, he brings up that Jack had a special relationship with Susan. He provides them with her address, and Biff tells him that he and Mario killed Berger there. Potterdam thus tells them that maybe Susan has the tape, so the two goons drive over there to get it, as well as kill her and anyone else who might be there.

Eventually, Susan suggests to Carl that they leave the apartment and go do something fun somewhere. Louis sees them leaving and notifies James about it just after he has unsuccessfully tried to tell a 911 operator about the dead body and the kidnapped pizza delivery man without Louis’ knowledge, and Louis informs him that they are going after them before deciding that they will bring Jack’s body and Pizza Man with them. Just then, Biff and Mario pull up in front of Susan’s apartment building, but before they can step out of the car, they spot James and Louis getting into Louis’ truck with Pizza Man and Jack’s corpse (and they learn that Jack is under the Nixon mask when it randomly falls off). After then seeing Carl and Susan leaving the parking garage in the latter’s car and then James and company following after them, they decide to pursue both parties. Also, Frost (Geoffrey Blake) and Luzinski (Cameron Dye) – two garbagemen parked nearby in their own car that are enemies of Carl and James – go after them as well, seeking to get revenge on them for a very nasty prank that they pulled on them earlier in the film. James is soon forced by Louis to speed through a red light so they don’t lose Carl and Susan, but this gets the attention of a police cruiser, which chases after them. Upon seeing that cops are now involved in this, Biff suggests to Mario that they forget about Jack’s body and just follow after Carl and Susan since the latter might have the tape on her. James soon pulls over by an esplanade, but to his extreme annoyance, he discovers that the cops are Mike (John Putch) and Jeff (Tommy Hinkley), who regularly harass Carl and James because they consider them to be nothing but a couple of never-do-wells and they look for any excuse they can to put them both in jail. Mike is gleefully ready to take James in for reckless driving, holding a pizza delivery guy hostage, and keeping a dead body in the truck, but Louis picks up the air rifle and aims it at Pizza Man’s head, pretending that it is a real rifle. He then intimidates Mike and Jeff into dropping their revolvers, then brings them over to a nearby children’s playground, where he forces them to strip down to their boxers and then handcuffs them to a roundabout in a position like they are having sex. They then try to pick up Carl’s and Susan’s trail again, but fail to do so because they have no idea where they could be. Ultimately, Louis decides that they will travel back along the esplanade to search for them.

Meanwhile, Carl and Susan take a nice stroll on the beach, and it ends with them lying down and making out on the sand. However, Biff and Mario interrupt them and hold them up with their weapons before forcing them to get up and walk towards their car. Fortunately, Carl and Susan get an opportunity to escape when Biff and Mario get into an argument and it ends with Mario zapping Biff with his taser, after which Carl tackles Mario down and then he and Susan start running. They make a beeline for her car, but it suddenly explodes, thanks to a failed prank that Frost and Luzinski tried to execute on it while Carl and Susan were enjoying each other’s company. As Carl and Susan flee the scene on foot, Susan asks Carl what is going on, so Carl proceeds to admit his real name and residence to her, and he adds that he saw her and Jack Berger fight in her apartment while he was spying on her. He then tells her that Jack was found dead in the trash the next day because somebody killed him, and he initially suspected that she committed the crime. Susan informs him that she and Jack got into a fight over a tape he wanted, and she left her apartment to retrieve it from her car, and she produces the tape from her purse and tells Carl that they have to get this to the police.

Carl and Susan reach the esplanade and find Mike and Jeff in their predicament and their cruiser still parked there, and they ignore Mike and Jeff’s pleas for help and find a ring of keys in their discarded clothes. As they try to find the right key for the door, they spot Biff and Mario coming up the road towards them, but Carl gets the cruiser door open and both he and Susan jump into it before Biff and Mario can run them over. Carl then gets the cruiser started and rams the goons’ car with it, but the impact takes more out of him and Susan than it does the goons, and he and Susan are soon held at gunpoint by the thugs just as Potterdam and some of his other henchmen appear. He takes Jack’s tape from Susan, then tells his men to put the duo in his limousine so they can go someplace “a little more noisy.” Just as Potterdam and company start to leave with Carl and Susan, we see James, Louis, and Pizza Man appear close by in the truck. After seeing what is befalling Carl and Susan, Louis decides to tail the villains so they can find out exactly what is going on.

They follow Rotterdam and his thugs all the way to the ChemLife plant, and when Louis remarks that they have to find a way in, James tells him that he has a plan. He thus has Louis and Pizza Man take Jack’s body and get inside a nearby garbage truck, intending to use the truck to bust through the front gates. However, none of them are aware that Frost and Luzinski have secretly arrived ahead of them and sabotaged the truck’s brake line. Meanwhile, Potterdam has both Carl and Susan sealed up inside of two empty toxic waste drums with the intention of disposing of them at the Las Playas Landfill along with the latest batch of waste that he has, figuring that, if they don’t get buried alive with the waste, they will just run out of oxygen from being sealed in the drums and suffocate.

James and company plow through the front gates as planned, but when James tries to put the brakes on the truck, he finds that he can’t, so the truck gets brought to a stop when it crashes into a bunch of toxic waste drums. The ruckus is heard by Potterdam and his men, so Potterdam orders two of his men to finish sealing the drums while he sends out the rest to investigate the noise. After burying Biff and Mario under a huge pile of trash that they unintentionally release from the truck, James and Louis step out to find Carl and Susan, armed with – respectively – the pellet rifle and a tire iron, and Pizza Man ends up staying in the truck, both to watch Jack’s corpse and because he feels he doesn’t have the skills needed to gamely combat a bunch of armed thugs. The disposal crew then appears before Potterdam, and he orders them to take all of the toxic waste and dump it at the landfill before the sun rises. As the workers use front loaders to move the pallets full of drums out to the waiting trucks, they have a run-in with James and Louis (though they don’t do anything about them for some reason), and the duo split up to avoid getting hit by the loaders. James runs, and when two front loaders swerve to avoid hitting each other when James gets in their way, the drum that Carl was placed in rolls off one of the pallets and hits the ground, breaking the seal and freeing him. James and Carl then run off towards the trucks, and they manage to grab hold of the back doors on the last truck just as the fleet of them leave for the landfill. Louis watches them go, but then he gets held up by two security guards. However, in the following scene, we see that Louis has disrobed and disarmed the guards and tied them up together to a fence in a position not unlike the one he put Jeff and Mike in, and after he puts Pizza Man and Jack’s body in the guards’ patrol car, he drives off after Carl and James. Along the way to the landfill, the bolt breaks on the doors that Carl and James are holding onto, and James eventually swings out into the opposite lane just as Frost and Luzinski are coming up that lane. James manages to swing the door back towards the truck and avoid a collision, but Frost and Luzinski swerve off the road to avoid him and crash.

A short time later, the trucks reach the landfill, and Carl and James quickly hide behind a bunch of tires while the workers get out and start rolling the toxic waste drums down an embankment and into a small lake. Carl and James then sneak up to one of the workers and hold him hostage with the pellet rifle, and they shout out to the others to stop what they are doing or else they will kill this worker. Louis and Pizza Man then show up in the patrol car a distance away, and though Louis pretends to be a police officer and orders everyone over the car’s speaker to drop their weapons, Pizza Man ruins James’ charade when he decides to pretend to be a cop as well and gets on the speaker and accidentally reveals to the villains that James’ rifle is a pellet rifle. Potterdam orders the workers to get Carl and James, so the duo split up, with Carl fighting off some goons and searching the drums to find the one that Susan is in while James starts fighting the workers, and Louis soon shows up to help James out. Carl eventually finds and frees Susan, but just as he kisses her, they see Potterdam driving towards them in a bulldozer. Fortunately, they get off the truck before he can hit them, and they run and join James, Louis, and Pizza Man in hiding behind another bunch of tires.

The group then hurry towards the patrol car so they can escape in that, but Louis discovers that it won’t start, and then Potterdam spots them and rolls towards them to crush them. Fortunately, the group manages to get out of the car with Jack’s body in the nick of time, so the only thing Potterdam crushes is the car. Potterdam then finds that the bulldozer has gotten stuck on the wreckage, so he gets out and looks around for the group, but can’t see them anywhere. Suddenly, Susan pops up out of an old refrigerator and sprays spray paint in his eyes, then Carl and James come running in from opposite directions and hit him in the head with metal trash can lids like a pair of cymbals. Pizza Man then opens the door to his limousine for him, but when he gets inside, he is horrified to find Jack’s body in there with a cigar in his mouth and holding a martini. He scrambles out the other side of the limousine, where Carl shoots him in the butt with a pellet from the rifle, and the pain of it causes him to go sliding down a metal pipe on the embankment right into the toxified water, defeating him. The protagonists look down at him from the edge of the embankment and laugh at his misfortune. The story ends there, and we are left to assume that the good guys brought Potterdam to justice.

The movie itself ends the next morning with Jeff and Mike still clad in their underwear and handcuffed to the roundabout, and a stray dog soon comes up to them and urinates on them.