10 / 10
The Best Buddy Film of the Eighties
Midnight Run is my favorite buddy comedy, and it’s criminally underrated. Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin are so good together that I’d happily watch them argue in a car for two hours, and that’s more or less what the film is. It came out in the same decade as Lethal Weapon, 48 Hrs and Beverly Hills Cop, and it’s better than all of them.
Martin Brest directed it in 1988, from George Gallo’s script, four years after Beverly Hills Cop made him one of the most bankable directors in Hollywood. It did respectable business and then got filed away as just another eighties action comedy, which it isn’t. It’s a 10, and it’s the film I’d hand to anyone who thinks De Niro can’t do comedy.
The Job
Jack Walsh is a bounty hunter in Los Angeles, a former Chicago cop who was pushed off the force for refusing to take bribes from the mob. He works for a bail bondsman named Eddie Moscone, who is always sweating and always on the phone, and he’s saving up to open a coffee shop and get out of the business.
Eddie gives him what looks like an easy job. Jonathan Mardukas, an accountant nicknamed the Duke, stole fifteen million dollars from a Las Vegas mobster named Jimmy Serrano, gave much of it away to charity and skipped bail. Walsh has to find him in New York and bring him back to Los Angeles within five days, or Eddie loses the bond. The fee is a hundred thousand dollars, enough to get Walsh out for good.
He finds the Duke in a day. Then the Duke tells him he won’t fly, and the easy job turns into the longest five days of Walsh’s life.
The Road
Because the Duke has a fear of flying, or claims to, and stages a panic attack on the plane to prove it, the film becomes a tour of America’s back roads. A train out of New York, a Greyhound bus, a stolen car, freight yards, small-town diners and finally the red canyons of Arizona.
Every leg of the trip adds another pursuer. Serrano’s men want the Duke dead before he can testify about the mob’s money. The FBI wants him alive as a witness and resents a bounty hunter getting in the way. And a rival bounty hunter named Marvin Dorfler wants to steal the job and the fee. By the last act, Walsh has all three closing in, and he’s running out of ways to keep moving.
The structure is simple, and that’s why it works. Two men who can’t stand each other, a deadline and a country to cross. Everything else is character, and every mile they travel gives the film another small chance to show us who these two people really are, and how much they have in common without wanting to admit it.
De Niro Is Funny
People were surprised that De Niro could be funny, and they shouldn’t have been. He plays Walsh completely straight, as a tired, angry man with a broken heart and a watch his ex-wife gave him that stopped years ago and that he won’t replace. He never plays a scene for laughs. The comedy comes from his slow burn, the weary stare, the swallowed fury, as the Duke finds every one of his nerves and leans on it.
It’s the same technique that makes Airplane! work: a serious actor playing ridiculous situations with complete gravity. De Niro had spent fifteen years as the most intense actor in America, and here he points that intensity at a mild-mannered accountant who won’t stop asking him personal questions, and the result is very funny.
Grodin Is the Secret
Charles Grodin is the perfect partner. The Duke is mild, fussy, polite and maddening, a man who lectures Walsh about his cholesterol, his smoking, his divorce and his feelings, all in the same reasonable tone of voice, while being dragged across the country in handcuffs.
He’s also the conscience of the film. He stole from the mob and gave the money to charity, and he’s genuinely puzzled that Walsh, who once refused a bribe himself, can’t see that they’re the same kind of man. Slowly, Walsh starts to see it. Their relationship shifts one small scene at a time, with no single moment where they become friends, and by the end Walsh would do almost anything for him.
The studio reportedly wanted a bigger star for the role. Brest insisted on Grodin, and every scene the two share proves he was right.
For Writers
The Duke needles Walsh about his cholesterol, his smoking and his divorce in the same reasonable voice, and each question gets under his skin. Their friction is the engine of every scene.
When you write a pair of characters, agreement is dull. Readers want to see two people who rub against each other in ways they can’t escape.
Give each of your leads one habit that drives the other mad, then trap them together. Let the habit surface in small ways in nearly every scene.
The Stolen Badge
The best running joke belongs to Yaphet Kotto as FBI agent Alonzo Mosely. Early in the film, Walsh steals Mosely’s badge, and for the rest of the trip he flashes it to get out of trouble, introducing himself as Alonzo Mosely of the FBI to cops, bus drivers and a sheriff.
Every time Mosely hears about it, his rage grows, and Kotto plays each discovery with a wonderful, mounting disbelief. When the two finally meet near the end, Mosely’s first demand is to get his badge back. It’s a perfect example of a small joke built patiently until it pays off.
For Writers
Walsh keeps using the stolen badge, and Mosely’s rage grows each time he hears about it. The joke pays off at the end because it was built patiently.
When you write a running joke, a single use gives a laugh and several uses give a structure. The reader starts waiting for the next one.
Plant your running joke early, bring it back three or four times, and let the consequences grow each time. Save the biggest return for the end of the story.
The Pursuers
John Ashton plays Marvin Dorfler, the rival bounty hunter, a dim, bitter man who keeps nearly winning and keeps getting punched, handcuffed or left behind. He’s the film’s comic relief and its best physical comedian. Dennis Farina plays Jimmy Serrano, the mobster, and he has one of the great phone calls in cinema: a furious, profane rant at his useless henchmen that shows exactly how he got where he is.
Joe Pantoliano, as the bail bondsman Eddie, spends the film on the phone, sweating, bargaining and lying to everyone, including Walsh. Every one of these characters wants something specific, and every one of them gets in the way of everyone else.
The Babysitting Money
The heart of the film is a scene with nothing funny in it. Walsh, broke and on the run, stops at his ex-wife’s house in Chicago to borrow money and a car. He hasn’t seen her or his daughter in nine years. His ex-wife is cold. His daughter, now a teenager, is shy and curious and delighted to see him, and when he’s leaving, she offers him the money she’s saved from babysitting.
De Niro barely speaks. He looks at his daughter, looks at the money and gives it back, and walks out. It’s devastating, and it’s the moment the film reveals what Walsh lost when he refused that bribe years ago. It also sets up the ending, and the watch he won’t replace suddenly makes sense.
For Writers
The film’s most moving scene has no jokes at all. Walsh’s daughter offers him her babysitting money, and in two minutes we understand everything he lost.
When you write a comedy, one serious scene placed at the right moment gives every joke after it more weight. Readers laugh harder once they care.
Find the moment where your comic character is most vulnerable, and write it completely straight. No jokes, no rescue. Let the reader sit with it.
The Action
There are real chases and real gunfights, and Brest keeps them rough and grounded. The helicopter scene in the Arizona canyons, with Walsh and the Duke clinging to a riverbank as a helicopter hunts them, is terrific. So is a sequence on a moving train and a car chase through a small town that ends in a pile of police cars.
None of it ever overwhelms the two men in the middle. The action is always there to put them in another situation where they have to argue, and the best action scenes are the ones where they’re fighting each other while someone else is shooting at them.
The Ending
At Los Angeles airport, Walsh has a choice. He can hand the Duke over and collect his hundred thousand dollars, knowing Serrano will have him killed in prison. Or he can let him go and lose everything he’s been working for. I won’t say what he chooses.
The Duke gives him something as they part, and it’s small, earned and perfect. Then Walsh tries to hail a cab with a hundred-dollar bill nobody can change, and walks off into the night. It’s the best ending of any buddy film of the eighties, and De Niro plays it without a word.
Why It’s a 10
Buddy films of the eighties mostly dated badly, because the jokes were topical and the action was the draw. Midnight Run’s jokes come from two characters who never change their essential natures, only their feelings about each other, and that doesn’t date.
The action is practical, the locations are real and the emotional beats are small enough to be believable. It’s a film about two men who have both lost their families, finding something like one in each other for five days. Danny Elfman’s bluesy, harmonica-driven score carries it all along. I’ve never tired of it.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Midnight Run puts two men who can’t stand each other in a situation where they can’t separate, and lets the dislike turn into loyalty one small scene at a time. There’s no single moment where they become friends.
When you write a partnership, the temptation is a single scene where the characters bond. That feels false, because nobody changes that fast.
Map five small moments where one character gives up a little ground to the other. Space them across the story, and never let either of them say out loud what’s happening.
Is Midnight Run as good as people say?
It’s better than most people know. It’s a 10, the best of the eighties buddy films, and one of the few action comedies with a real heart. Watch it for De Niro and Grodin, for the stolen badge and for the babysitting money, and stay for the last shot.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists