🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸’s review published on Letterboxd:
"I also suffer from acrophobia and claustrophobia."
"I'll tell you what: if you don't cooperate, you're gonna suffer from 'fistophobia'."
The first time I ever saw Midnight Run was via a BBC1 showing in the early nineties. They dubbed ALL the swearing. ALL OF IT. And yet, I still loved it. I don't know if it was because of a particularly fabulous effort on the part of the BBC dubbing department or if it was because the wonderful film underneath the censorship shone through anyway. But it's one of those things that you really had to be there to see because even having witnessed it myself, I simply cannot now, 20 years on, picture how they did it.
Taking the swearing out of this film, after all, would be like taking the left leg off Ryan Giggs or some other comparison that is considerably less gruesome. You get my point, though. If ever you need to point out to someone that swearing can actually be very big and very clever, then you would show them Midnight Run before you would show them any other film, I would like to hope.
Of course, this isn't just a film about swearing, but it is of course an integral part of some of the very best, most quotable and most superbly performed comedy dialogue of perhaps any film from the last 25 years. It was reportedly occasionally improvised but more important is the fact that it is always wonderfully pointed and usually hilariously curt:-
"If I hear any more shit outta you, I'm gonna fucking bust your head, and I'm gonna put you back in that fucking hole, and I'm gonna stick your head in that fucking toilet bowl and I'm gonna make it stay there."
It's interesting that people still express surprise that it's Robert De Niro coming out with these lines and contributing so much of the comedy to this film because, really, he's not exactly playing much out of his comfort zone here. This kind of dialogue is not all that dissimilar to dialogue he had been acting out for many years before Midnight Run and quite a few after it. It's all about the situation and the tone, and that has little to do with De Niro.
That credit and work has to go to Charles Grodin, who, with marvellous support from John Ashton especially, dictates that comedy tone and just allows De Niro, for the most part, to be 'himself'. This is Grodin's greatest performance. He's a comedy actor of high quality with far too many underrated gems in his back catalogue but for my mind he actually carries this film, and is able to switch to the odd dramatic moment with not problem at all.
That is where De Niro is clearly at his best and most comfortable here, as expected, but on the odd occasion he gets to goof around, such as when he flashes the recently stolen badge of Yaphet Kotto (also superb here) in the street, he is clearly having great fun. It really does make all the difference, too, because we have seen all too often in the last 10 years that a disinterested De Niro can completely sink a film.
It's the De Niro and Grodin show, that's for sure, but the support cast packs in the quality and laughs. The aforementioned Ashton and Kotto are marvellous, but Dennis Farina at his foul-mouthed best, Joe Pantoliano as a slimy bail bond business owner, Jack Kehoe as his 'doughnut obsessed' assistant, and Richard Foronjy and Robert Miranda as Moron #1 and #2 all have truly great moments.
Midnight Run has slowly but steadily been gaining further and wide plaudits over the last few years, but I suspect it's going to take a very long time indeed, at this rate, before it gets the true depth of appreciation that it deserves. It's one of the best comedy films that I have ever seen by quite some distance.
MARVIN!