MIDNIGHT RUN
With Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin, Yaphet Kotto, John Ashton, and Dennis Farina.
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If it were merely a matter of script, direction, and technical credits, this formula cross-country-chase comedy wouldn’t be worth a minute of one’s time, much less the price of a movie ticket. Martin Brest, who launched his career a little over a decade ago by leaping from a forgettable $33,000 independent feature called Hot Tomorrows to a $5 million heist comedy called Going in Style, followed by Beverly Hills Cop, comes on like a competent if faceless TV director, scoring with all the desired effects of his mechanical mise en scene, but leaving no discernible memory traces behind him. The script by George Gallo, a newcomer whose only previously produced screenplay was for Wise Guys (1986), is as formulaic as they come, even down to multiple and periodic plot twists that seem to come along before every invisible station break. Danny Elfman’s pop score is aggressively banal, and Donald Thorin’s cinematography is thoroughly unremarkable. What this movie has is lively performances by two of the best actors in the business, Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin; without them, it would be little more than a hole in the screen.
A few soft facts: The press materials for Midnight Run quote Brest as saying that this movie combines the meticulously preplanned shooting style of Hot Tomorrows with the more improvisational style of Beverly Hills Cop, “where the script was changed each and every day,” apparently according to the inspirations of Eddie Murphy. Brest also mentions that the plot of Midnight Run grew out of an anecdote told him by screenwriter George Gallo while they were discussing another project, and that neither De Niro nor Grodin was considered at first.
Jack is attempting to get John, in handcuffs, from New York to LA while the FBI, the mob, and a rival bounty hunter are all in hot pursuit; John steadily needles his captor about the junk food he eats, the cigarettes he smokes, the way he tips in restaurants, and his unrealistic dreams of opening a coffee shop with his bounty money. Showering Jack with unsolicited personal advice, John even convinces him to visit his former wife and teenage daughter in Chicago, and later to give up his fantasy of somehow eventually getting back together with them. Meanwhile John is learning that Jack, under his seeming hardness and cynicism, has a personal moral code as strict as his own.
