Midnight Run *****
It was Good Friday morning, before seven, I got up (carefully) and decided that some light entertainment was in order. I selected my still celophane-wrapped Midnight Run dvd from the shelf and proceeded to enjoy the next couple of hours. There are some films which are haute cuisine and not the sort of things that one might want to consume too often. Then there is the classic hamburger, pefectly cooked, delicious relish and crispy chips; this is one of those. I have seen it often enough to have become familiar with its foibles which are most easily forgiven, I imagine that I will watch this many more times.
Robert De Niro is honest but hard done by bounty hunter Jack Walsh and the under-rated Charles Grodin plays Jonathan Mardukas, an accountant who has embezzled $15 million dollars from the mob (and given it to charity). It is essentially a road movie as the pair of them are chased across America from New York to L.A. The Grodin character is laconic, well meaning and prone to offering Jack advice about how he should change his life if he is to avoid an early grave. Jack is resigned to a lonely slightly self-ptiying existence; one that might be tempered by the big pay-off he will receive if he delivers "the Duke" to his bail bondsman in L.A. Their relationship is what the film is about and where most of the humour comes from.
It is directed by Martin "Beverley Hills Cop" Brest, but whilst that earlier film was very much of its time, this one seems to have side-stepped such a limitation. The story is comfortably well enough thought-through, not to distract from the set pieces and the interaction between members of the superb cast. Yaphet Koto who you might remember as Mr Big and Kanaga in the only properly funny James Bond film, Live and Let Die is the permanently exasperated FBI Agent Alonzo Mosely, (did you know that Live and Let die was written by the director of Eddie Murphy's first stand up movie, Dilerious)? Dennis Farina, always funny and scary in equal measure (he played Ray Barboni in Get Shorty), is as scary and funny as usual as mob boss Jimmy Serrano.
There are at least a couple of images that reappear in some shape or form in other films; there is a version of De Niro's "I am talking to a dead man" line, which he later uses in Heat and Dennis Farina announces rather prophetically that he is going to smash his telephone into someone's head; we actually have to wait for Get Shorty for him to do that to Gene Hackman's Harry Zimm. John Ashton (one of the LAPD foils for Eddie Murphy in Beverley Hills Cop) reappears here with great affect (as Marvin Dorfler, Jack Walsh's main competition).
This film always makes me laugh out loud, I am waiting like a child wanting his favourite bedtime story for my favourite jokes but, call me a sentimental piece of moist tissue, it also manages to move me a little every time I see it, that's probably the De Niro factor.