Dirty Work (1998 film)


Dirty Work is a 1998 American comedy film starring Norm Macdonald, Artie Lange, Jack Warden, and Traylor Howard and directed by Bob Saget. In the film, long-time friends Mitch and Sam start a revenge-for-hire business, and work to fund heart surgery for Sam's father Pops. When they take on work for an unscrupulous businessman, in order to be paid, they create a revenge scheme of their own. Notable cameo appearances include Don Rickles, Rebecca Romijn, John Goodman, Gary Coleman, Chris Farley, and Adam Sandler as Satan.
The film was the first starring vehicle for Macdonald and Lange and the first feature film directed by Saget, coming one year after he left his long-running role as host of America's Funniest Home Videos.
Though the film received largely negative critical reviews upon its 1998 release and was a financial disappointment, it has since become a cult classic and has been reappraised more positively by some critics. Co-star Artie Lange later became a regular on The Howard Stern Show, where the film was sometimes discussed.

Plot

Growing up, friends Mitch Weaver and Sam McKenna are taught by Sam's hard-nosed dad, "Pops" McKenna, not to "take crap from anyone". To that end, the pair plant a bunch of guns in a schoolyard bully's desk and have him arrested for gun possession; next, they catch a kid-fondling crossing guard in the act, after having applied Krazy Glue to the bottom of Mitch's pants.
As adults, after losing fourteen jobs in three months and being dumped by his girlfriend, Mitch moves in with Sam and Pops, who then has a heart attack. In the hospital, Pops confides that, because of their parents' swinging lifestyle, he is also Mitch's father. Even though Pops' heart is failing, Dr. Farthing, a hopeless gambler, will raise Mr. McKenna's position on the transplant waiting list if he is paid $50,000, to save himself from his bookie. Mitch and Sam get jobs in a cinema with an abusive manager and exact their revenge by showing Men In Black to a packed house. The other workers congratulate them and suggest they go into business.
Mitch and Sam open "Dirty Work", a revenge-for-hire business. Mitch falls for a woman named Kathy who works for a shady used car dealer. After publicly embarrassing the dealer during a live TV commercial, the duo exacts increasingly lucrative reprisals for satisfied customers until they interfere with unscrupulous local property developer Travis Cole. Cole tricks them into destroying "his" apartment building, promising to pay them enough to save Pops. Afterwards, Cole reneges, revealing that he is not the owner and that he had them vandalize the building so that he could buy it cheaply, evict the tenants, and build a parking lot for his luxurious new opera house. Unknown to Cole, Mitch's "note to self" mini-tape recorder captures this confession.
Mitch and Sam plot their revenge on Cole, using the tape to set up an elaborate trap. Using skunks, a loyal army of prostitutes, homeless men, a noseless friend, brownies with hallucinogenic additives, and Pops, they ruin the opening night of Don Giovanni, an opera sponsored prominently by Cole. With the media present, Mitch plays back Cole's confession over the theater's sound system. Cole sees that his public image is being tarnished and agrees to pay the $50,000. In the end, Cole is punched in the stomach, arrested and jailed, his dog is raped by a skunk, Pops gets his operation, and Mitch gets the girl. Dr. Farthing overcomes his gambling habit but is beaten to death by bookies in the end.

Cast

;Cameo appearances
Filmed at Wycliffe College and elsewhere around Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the film was produced for an estimated $13 million.
In his first appearance on The Howard Stern Show on September 18, 2008, Chevy Chase discussed the film's production and release with Artie Lange. According to Chase, he was impressed by the original script's raunchy, R-rated, "over the top" tone and, Lange related, went so far as to beg Macdonald not to allow any changes—to "keep it funny". Lange said the studio insisted on a PG-13 rating and moved the film's release from the February dump months to June, where it fared poorly against blockbusters like Godzilla.
During production, Norm MacDonald was embroiled in a feud with Don Ohlmeyer, then an executive with NBC. Ohlmeyer, a friend of O. J. Simpson, took offense at MacDonald's frequent and pointed jokes against Simpson on Weekend Update and had MacDonald fired from the position. Ohlmeyer went further and refused to sell advertising space or air commercials for Dirty Work. NBC eventually relented a week after the film premiered.
Dirty Work was Chris Farley's last-released film appearance, filmed before his fatal drug overdose in December 1997.
MGM released the film on DVD, in August 1999, and for digital rental/purchase.

Reception

The film received mostly negative critical reviews. It was referred to as a "leaden, taste-deprived attempted comedy" and "a desert of comedy" with only infrequent humor in The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times described it as "a tone-deaf, scattershot and dispiritingly cheesy affair with more groans than laughs", and though Macdonald "does uncork a few solid one-liners", his lack of conviction in his acting "is amusing in and of itself, but it doesn't help the movie much".
The San Francisco Chronicle recommended the film only for "people who like stupid lowdown vulgar comedy. I had a few good laughs."
It has a 17% critic rating at Rotten Tomatoes, averaged from 30 reviews. The film has been described as a "cult classic". In his column, My Year Of Flops, critic Nathan Rabin describes Dirty Work as an example of "the ironic dumb comedy, the slyly postmodern lowbrow gag-fest that so lustily, nakedly embraces and exposes the machinations and conventions of stupid laffers that it becomes a sort of sublime bit of meta-comedy".

Sequel

In 2018 when asked about a sequel, MacDonald stated "It was an R-rated movie, so we made it that way, then they made it , so half the movie had to be cut. So it's hard for me to see it objectively. There might be another one coming now, I guess." MacDonald did not elaborate further regarding the potential sequel.