"It is truly in your best interest to just relax". So quips Robert De Niro's Jack Walsh in 1988's Midnight Run, a rather overrated piece of action-thronged swipe. Yeah 95% on Rotten doesn't lie but it would be in my best interest as a critic to not lie to myself.
So yeah, Midnight Run was directed by then box office champ Martin Brest, coming off the huge success of one Beverly Hills Cop. With "Run", Brest gives the film a dangerous vitality and a frantic pace, a little too frantic for him to handle considering that his work usually moves at a snail's lick. I mean with Martin it's all about the cinematic journey, the means to a long end. That's why Midnight Run has tons of locales (including a Niles, MI train station located 20 miles from where I grew up) and milieus, a sort of crisscross-whiffed Americana. "What do think this is a class trip?" You said it Bob not me.
A Mexican standoff here, a helicopter/car chase there, crime boss high noon-s everywhere, Midnight Run is like 1987's Planes, Trains and Automobiles for bounty hunters. The only problem is that the flick doesn't have much heart, or characters you get to really know, or an actual, composite story. It's basically a well-acted pic with De Niro's Walsh pursuing a mob accountant (Jonathan Mardukas played by Charles Grodin) in hopes of getting him back to LA to collect $100,000 from a bail bondsman.
Clocking in at just over two hours, Midnight Run provides plenty of gun-drawing battles, fade in, fade out personas, and jocular payoffs only to evaporate right after the closing credits come up. I mean all the witty banter between De Niro/Grodin and humor me scenes of public place, 80s chain smoking aren't gonna get me closer to recommending it. Tip and "run".
Written by Jesse Burleson
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