Midnight Run was written by George Gallo and directed by Martin Brest in 1988, and was released to critical success. That they wind up being pursued by a rival bounty hunter, a gaggle of gangsters looking to kill Jonathan, and the FBI (led by the inimitable Yaphet Kotto as Special Agent Alonzo Mosely), means that for the first time, they also get to experience solidarity against the rest of the world-a beautiful thing, since, until now, both men had been up against all the forces out to get them, by themselves. Each of them is alone (technically Jonathan has a wife and a dog he loves, but he is also a wanted man who must spend his life in hiding, not the greatest social scenario in the world). The special thing about Midnight Run is that “friendship” isn’t merely something that happens to them because of the genre they’re in it’s something they each really need. ![]() It is the tale of a pitch-perfect, once-in-a-lifetime friendship doomed by circumstance to be nothing more than a fleeting encounter. Midnight Run is, in the words of the great critic Alan Sepinwall, “ the Casablanca of buddy comedies” it is a road-trip odd-couple action-adventure but it is also, first and foremost, a tragic love story. Neither man can deny their instant connection, although they do try hard for a while. But he also is fascinated by the bounty hunter, a man who is his exact opposite but with whom, he realizes, he shares a sense of ethics. Jonathan is stretching out their trip, looking for ways to trick Jack and escape. Jonathan smiles lightly as they walk towards the train platform “I love to travel by train,” he calmly tells the frazzled Jack, as if nothing out of the ordinary has driven them to this point. After Jonathan’s screaming protests get them booted out of JFK, they journey to Grand Central. In fact, Jonathan is already in control of his journey towards captivity more than Jack would like they are on a train in the first place because of Jonathan’s severe “aviophobia,” which manifested in an spectacular panic attack after they boarded a plane to LA. ![]() It’s clear that Jonathan will soon get under Jack’s skin, if he hasn’t already. The conversation in the dining car encapsulates the entire dynamic of the two men: Jack’s veneer of tough-guy disaffection and Jonathan’s incessant, slow, slightly-smug undermining of it. It is the story of a pitch-perfect, once-in-a-lifetime friendship doomed by circumstance to be nothing more than a fleeting encounter. “I’m gonna have to give you the slip,” he tells Jack matter-of-factly while aboard the train. Jack has located him rather easily, but he still has to drag him across the entire country in only a few days, and Jonathan is clear that he plans to subvert this plan as best he can, knowing that he will be killed by mob hit-men as soon as he arrives in LA. Wanting to do something good after the years he unwittingly spent helping a sinister outfit, he has stolen $15 million from their accounts, given most of it to charity, and then vanished. He is in this mess in the first place because, while working as an accountant, he had discovered that his firm was a front for the Chicago mob. As normal as he might present, Jonathan is slippery. If this seems like surprising conversation between a bounty hunter and his prisoner, it is because it is, but Jack is determined not to seem taken aback by Jonathan’s questions. ![]() After a moment he asks, slightly more emphatically, “ why would you eat that?” ![]() “Mail it to me from C-block,” he says, but Jonathan remains undeterred. “If you want, I can outline a complete balanced diet for you.” Finally Jack responds. Jonathan continues, in the same quiet, serious tone: “ Cholesterol?” Jack still says nothing. Jack stares back, shoving the meaty end of a drumstick into his mouth. He asks Jack, “Familiar with the word arteriosclerosis?” Eventually he speaks, in a low, grave voice. Jonathan is watching in silence as Jack gnaws on a chicken wing. Bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) and his captured fugitive, an embezzler with a heart of gold named Jonathan Mardukas (Charles Grodin), are seated across from one another in the dining car on a train that’s speeding west from New York to Los Angeles, where Walsh must bring his charge. There is a scene towards the beginning of Midnight Run in which the two main characters have their first in-depth conversation.
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