Midnight Run

Midnight Run has thrills, excellent performances, touching moments, slick plotting, lively dialogue, plenty of laughs, beautiful locations and finely detailed direction. It's an across-the-board success, the best new movie I've seen in years. [20 July 1988]

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.

The virtue of Midnight Run is not that it does anything new; the virtue is that it does everything old so well.

Miraculously, De Niro and Grodin turn this sow's ear into a plausible vehicle for a buddy movie, and thanks to both of them, this movie springs to life.

There isn't a single performance in Midnight Run that doesn't have a pulse, that doesn't show the actors at their best or near-best, especially De Niro. [20 July 1988]

Director Martin Brest has allowed the actors to improvise, and their resulting interaction is more realistic, funny, and surprising than that of any buddy film released in the last several years.

Midnight Run is two films. One is a succession of bright, razor-edge, nutty dialogues between two men. The other is the plot that keeps them together, which is stale and full of boring violent-comic action. [29 Aug 1988]

One helluva buddy movie. The chemistry between De Niro and Grodin is wonderful. The writing is superb, the dialogue between the two leads is stellar and is a such delight to listen to. Respect to George Gallo. Most of the side characters in this are just as funny to watch as the leading pair, due in no small part to the amazing casting of those characters. The movie transitions smoothly from road trip-esque scenes where Jack is escorting"The Duke" back to L.A. to collect the bounty on his head to scenes where the duo have to outrun gangsters and the FBI. I love, love, LOVE this movie. Midnight Run is (this is cliche, but...) a joy from start to finish.

One of my favorite movies of all-time. DeNiro and Grodin are hilarious, delivering excellently written lines throughout. Simply marvelous, no matter how many times you watch it.

An average movie, the plot is ordinary, but the actors are great, and the ending is very nice

Just a few years removed from his most grizzled, death-rattle-serious work, Robert De Niro decides to go after some lighter fare for a change of pace and realizes it's not a bad fit. As an ex-cop bounty hunter with good intentions, De Niro takes a potentially flavorless role and shapes it into something deeper, adding personality and character where it's clear none was hinted in the script. Director Martin Brest deserves credit for allowing his cast the chance to ad-lib, as the film enjoys a much more honest, believable central relationship as a result. While the plot details bear more than a passing resemblance to the previous year's Planes, Trains and Automobiles, it's more straight-laced than that and never completely steps across the line into full-blown comedy, though it does test the boundaries. An overachieving, tenuous buddy film in the same vein as 48 HRS, this one maintains a quick pace on a winding path without throwing its passengers.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]