Bridging the Gap: MIDNIGHT RUN (1988)

It’s finally time to hit the road with Jack Walsh and The Duke.

I love buddy comedies. I might love road trip movies even more. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is one of my all-time favorite movies. I can’t wait to finally tackle the Lethal Weapon series for Franchise Friday. Tommy Boy, The Blues Brothers, Vacation, Dumb and Dumber — I love them all. 

So how is it that just now, 35 years after its release, I’m finally catching up with Midnight Run? 

A fair answer is that I was only 8 years old when Martin Brest’s action comedy was released (one week later, I’d turn 9); not the ideal demographic for this R-rated, F-bomb-punctuated movie. Over the years, several people I respect have talked about it quite a bit, and it’s been added to various streaming queues – but each time I finally had the chance to sit and watch it, it disappeared from whatever service it was on. 

Finally, a few weeks back, I got a heads-up that it was available again on Netflix. I had a clear calendar that Saturday evening, so I decided to finally give it a go. And those critics and friends were right: Midnight Run is fantastic. It didn’t invent the buddy movie – they had been around for decades and just in the year prior we had both Lethal Weapon and Planes, Trains and Automobiles – and it didn’t reinvent it. It just simply did what the formula expects better than most other films of its kind. 

Robert De Niro is Jack Walsh, a former Chicago cop now relegated to being an L.A.-based skip-tracer, hunting down wayward crooks for a stressed-out bail bondsman (Joe Pantoliano). It’s a scuzzy job; Jack is shot at, abused, resented by cops and constantly foiled by frenemy Marvin Dorfler (John Ashton). He’s ready to give it up and gets his chance when he’s offered a job to bring in Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas (Charles Grodin), an accountant who embezzled $15 million from mob boss Serrano (Dennis Farina) and gave it to charity. If Jack can bring The Duke in within five days, he’ll net $100,000 and be able to step away.

It appears easy at first. Jack tracks The Duke to New York, where he apprehends him almost without a hitch – the only wrinkle is a vicious dog who corners Jack in The Duke’s shower. Shortly after, Jack and The Duke are sitting in first class awaiting a flight to L.A. Jack is giddy to net his pay, ordering champagne and steaks. But The Duke has a fear of flying that gets them booted from the aircraft and set on a cross-country journey that has them trying to stay one step ahead of Dorfler, the mob and FBI Agent Alonzo Mosely (Yaphet Kotto), who all want The Duke for their own ends. 

A buddy comedy is only as good as the team at its center, and De Niro and Grodin make for one of the best. Just mentioning those leads, you can see how the mismatch is presented: Jack is a gruff, no-nonsense bounty hunter; The Duke is talkative to the point of annoyance, needling Jack with questions and “helpful” health and financial advice. But where many buddy comedies push the personalities to extremes, creating characters who exist only to chafe at each other, Midnight Run is refreshing in the ways that both Jack and The Duke are grounded, real characters who have more in common than they initially think. 

These days, seeing De Niro’s name in a comedy usually elicits cringes. The actor figured out long ago that all he had to do was parody his tough guy persona and let funnier people bounce off him and he could have a successful (financially, not necessarily creatively) comedy. And while I enjoyed both Analyze This and Meet the Parents, diminishing returns set in fairly quick, allowing De Niro to go lazy for laughs in those sequels and dreck like The War with Grandpa and Bad Grandpa (let’s keep De Niro out of movies with Grandpa in the title). It’s frustrating, because he can still deliver top-notch work in movies like Silver Linings Playbook and The Irishman, but he keeps being roped into paycheck comedies. 

By 1988, De Niro was firmly cemented as one of the greats, and seeing him fronting a comedy was likely a shock (he apparently really wanted to test out his comedic chops; he took this role after dropping out of the lead in Big). While I don’t know that Midnight Run is De Niro’s most accomplished performance, just one viewing and it’s become one of my favorites. The key is that he plays Jack as a real character; there’s emotional weight because of past decisions, and he’s believable as a wiseass bounty hunter, trading barbs with the FBI even before he encounters The Duke. And Jack’s not a humorless killjoy; there’s a playfulness to De Niro’s performance. Shortly after his first meeting with Mosely and the FBI, in which Jack swipes the agent’s ID, he’s walking away down the street and stops to flash his badge at the camera. It’s a funny throwaway joke that gooses the fun instead of becoming mired in self-seriousness. 

Grodin, of course, was already an established comic presence by this point, and there’s no surprise to what he does – it’s just that he comes in and does it so well. Few people did dry humor as successfully as Grodin, and I don’t know that anyone could make ordinariness so funny. He never overplays The Duke’s fussiness or fears; where a more insecure film would make his aviophobia an over-the-top set piece, Grodin keeps it just heightened enough to be funny without devolving into shtick. The Duke is fussy and particular, but he’s also well aware of how easy (and fun) it is to get under Jack’s skin, and he needles him with repeated questions about his past with the Chicago PD, peppers him with nags about his dietary and smoking habits, and does what he can to make his captor annoyed but not miserable. 

The result is a buddy comedy that feels organic, and it’s a lot of fun to watch Grodin and De Niro bicker back and forth, particularly as it’s revealed that The Duke has his own methods of control to draw this out (the “you lied to me first” dialogue after the truth about his aviophobia is revealed is a highlight). The dialogue is endlessly quotable (Jack’s “two words” made me cackle) and the duo has a great comedic chemistry together; there’s a throwaway moment where Jack, talking to the mob via a phone booth, tells them he’ll happily plug The Duke; De Niro’s subtle shake of his head to reassure the accountant is a great bit of comedy. 

But the relationship never works if you can’t believe these are real characters, not just a screenwriter’s insult delivery system. And there’s enough emotional weight to the film that makes their evolving friendship believable. About halfway through the film, there’s a stop at Jack’s ex-wife’s house, and there’s a moment of emotional truth when he sees the daughter he’s been kept from for nine years that is surprisingly raw for a movie that, to this point, has been a fairly by-the-numbers comedy. De Niro doesn’t overplay the emotion, but he’s willing to sit in the gravity of it rather than deflect with a joke; as the two are leaving the house, there’s a sadness to the moment that the movie lets linger (there are shades of the “people like me” sequence in Planes, Trains and Automobiles here). Another scene, as Jack and The Duke ride the rails, allows Grodin to use his improvisation skills to get a smile out of De Niro, and it leads to a scene that is funny and sweet, a hint that in another life, these two could have actually been pals. 

The best buddy movies are about empathy, and the secret sauce to Midnight Run is not in the mismatch between Jack and The Duke but in the way their similarities are revealed. Both are paying the price for doing the right thing. The Duke, as he points out, wasn’t a criminal accountant; he was just a happily married guy working for his firm, and he discovered their clients weren’t on the up and up. He decided to play Robin Hood, and now he’s anticipating a future where he’ll likely be murdered in prison. Jack was a straight-arrow Chicago cop with a wife and daughter, and he lost it all because he refused to jump on the mob’s payroll. He lives and works alone, and his tough guy shtick is a defense mechanism; De Niro lets Jack’s humanity seep through the more time he spends with The Duke. His final choice is probably predictable, but the emotion behind it is genuine, and its bolstered by a surprising reveal from The Duke that lets both actors do some truly touching work. Grodin and De Niro really are a special pair, and while I’m glad we never got to see their chemistry watered down with sequels, I probably would have happily turned to another adventure with these two (there was a TV movie without both leads, and sequels were discussed up until Grodin’s death in 2021). 

Brest’s filmography wasn’t overly long, but it was dotted with some fascinating hits and failures. The megahit Beverly Hills Cop is his best-known film – and one that’s probably overdue for a revisit – and I imagine Midnight Run was highly anticipated as his follow-up. The movie didn’t light the box office on fire, making only $38 million domestic on a $35 million budget (a lot of the audience was probably preoccupied with Die Hard, which opened five days earlier), but it gained an audience on video and cable. Brest next directed Al Pacino to his Oscar in Scent of a Women four years later (a performance I like in a movie that I don’t), and then whiffed with Meet Joe Black in 1997 before Gigli seemingly ended his career six years later. 

I’ve always rooted for Brest to make some sort of comeback, because as awful as Gigli is, it shouldn’t be the final entry in anyone’s career. And Midnight Run shows a journeyman director at the top of his game. George Callo’s script is smart and propulsive, and Brest understands the mixture of action and comedy that’s required. The film is funny without being zany, exciting without ever taking itself too seriously. It’s probably slightly too long and overstuffed, but it’s overstuffed with good things. There’s a car chase that reminded me how much I miss movies where 50 police cars flipped over ditches and off cliffs, a tense river escape, and a thrilling helicopter chase. Where a lot of action movies are peppered with comedy, this is a comedy that is punctuated by effective action beats that never overwhelm the story. The characters are always foregrounded and even something like the helicopter chase or rapids sequence exist solely so Jack and The Duke can be given the opportunities to save each others’ lives. Under it all is a bluesy score from Danny Elfman – a score that I wouldn’t believe Elfman had written if the credits didn’t tell me so. 

Brest always knew how to use his casts, and in addition to the power team of De Niro and Grodin, he gets great mileage from an outstanding ensemble. Pantoliano has been making films better for decades now, but I wonder if he’s ever been funnier or more charismatic than as this film’s stressed, unreliable bondsman. Kotto was one of the great screen presences, and it’s wonderful to watch him grow more and more irritated as Jack keeps slipping through his fingers, more often than not by using Mosely’s ID. Few people gave mob performances better than Farina, and even Philip Baker Hall shows up in an early role as the head of a crime family. But my favorite supporting performance might be Ashton as Dorfler, constantly shifting from ally to enemy, and always getting sucker-punched or nearly killed for his efforts. 

I tend to be wary about approaching older movies that others have raved about for years, as they’re too often saddled with expectation. But Midnight Run lived up to and probably exceeded those expectations; it was the perfect movie to stay up late watching on a Saturday night, and it’s one I can see myself revisiting several times just for the joy of spending some more time with these characters. It’s a ton of fun, and one of the highlights of a subgenre I love.