Never has a movie belonged so wholly to its stars. This is not to discredit George Gallo’s screenplay for Midnight Run, which makes plenty of room for character while also offering a clever, planes-trains-automobiles-walking on foot circular structure to the narrative. Nor is it to dismiss the comic blocking and sturdy action set pieces guided by director Martin Brest (Beverly Hills Cop) and cinematographer Donald E. Thorin (Thief). It’s only to note that all of this and more would be forgettable if Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin weren’t sharing the screen. De Niro plays Jack Walsh, a bounty hunter trying to drag a mob accountant who has gone rogue—Grodin’s Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas—across the country, with hit men, the FBI, local cops, and a rival bounty hunter in pursuit. Individually, the two leads are fine; De Niro gives a humorous edge to his familiar grimace, while Grodin tempers his usual disdain with a surprising gentleness. But together—in scenes involving a fair amount of improvisation—they’re sublime, not so much a comic team as an oil-and-water concoction that’s been aged to perfection. Consider the face De Niro pulls—of boiling rage reluctantly reducing to a bemused simmer—as Jack listens to John engage in an imaginary conversation between the two of them, “playing” both of their parts himself. And then there are the moments when they get to work with—rather than against—each other, as when they pose as federal agents investigating counterfeit bills in a saloon and get into a circular, nonsensical conversation about why the owner’s nickname is Red. Midnight Run’s excellence exists in riffs and bits like this. It’s not the sum of its parts, so much as it is the way De Niro and Grodin make almost every one of those parts glisten.
(9/7/2023)
