Review for Midnight Run

Introduction

I adore Midnight Run. It’s one of my favourite movies to come out of the eighties, a brilliant road movie, combining action and comedy to perfection, with pace, wit, and a great soundtrack. And it slumped at the box office, not one of Universal’s hits for 1988. Like so many hidden gems, it really found its fans on home video, and on TV showings, but the legacy of the box office receipts has a long reach. When it came to DVD, Universal just wanted to get it out there, and it came on a barebones, non-anamorphic DVD, a disc which I have cherished and replayed quite often in the past decade or so. But a part of me always waited for a decent release, anamorphic, surround sound, extra features, what we’ve come to expect from Hollywood DVDs. That particular release never materialised, and I thought my wait would be fruitless. Only Midnight Run is now coming out on Blu-ray, high definition, with surround sound, and extras. Universal haven’t had a change of heart. It’s fallen to boutique specialist Second Sight to lavish the care and attention that we all know this film deserves.


Jonathan "The Duke" Mardukas, having embezzled $15 million in mob money has jumped bail, leaving bail bondsman Eddie Moscone $450,000 out of pocket. Jack Walsh, an ex-cop turned bounty hunter has to get him from New York to LA in five days for a reward, but he has the FBI on his tail, wanting Mardukas to testify against mob boss, Jimmy Serrano. Understandably, Serrano wants the Duke dead, so Walsh moreover has to duck mob bullets. Also in the chase is fellow bounty hunter Marvin Dorfler, who`ll do anything to relieve Walsh of his charge. If these foes won`t kill the Duke and Walsh, maybe they`ll kill each other.

Picture

Midnight Run gets a 1.85:1 transfer at 1080p resolution. It’s just what I want from Blu-ray transfers of classic films, a straightforward presentation without significant post-production efforts to make them live up to modern HD standards. Midnight Run’s print is transferred to disc in a stable and clean form, looking just as grainy and filmic as I expect. But film stock from the eighties was never that great, so there is a greater degree of softness than you might expect, grain can be heavy at times, particularly in darker scenes and it’s also at these points where detail levels can drop, contrast fade. But generally it’s a very pleasing high definition presentation, with rich and faithful colours, strong detail levels, and no problems with compression that I could see. It’s all for the best, as Midnight Run has some great, cross-country locations, as the Duke and Jack Walsh travel from New York to Los Angeles, via Chicago, Texas and Arizona (and New Zealand).

Sound

The audio in Midnight Run is out of sync by around 30ms on my player, preceding the image. This is a significant issue, with lip sync off by just enough to feel weird, without being too obvious. Then again, the Panasonic player that I do have, a SC BTT 490 lets you offset the audio delay during playback which almost rectifies it (there’s another scene at the 90 minute mark aboard a freight train which remains out of sync), but as the Panasonic offsets in multiples of ten, I can’t quite get the audio to match exactly.


Midnight Run offers audio in PCM 2.0 Stereo and DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround English, with optional English subtitles. The original stereo experience is authentic, with the action represented well, the dialogue clear, and Danny Elfman’s jaunty, energetic score driving the film. The surround track wisely keeps most everything at the front, with really only the music making most use of the rear speakers, but there is just enough extra space and presence in the surround for the action and ambience to give the film a little more dimension.

Extras

Midnight Run’s Blu-ray disc presents its content with an animated menu. I’m not too keen on the cover art, and I don’t think it’s a patch on the original art used for the DVD cover, but it does the job well enough.


Second Sight have come up trumps when it comes to extra features, sourcing some very enjoyable interviews, although Robert De Niro, director Martin Brest, and composer Danny Elfman are noticeably absent. However, you do get video interviews with Charles Grodin (12:27), Joe Pantoliano (14:24), John Ashton (17:27), and screenwriter George Gallo (24:48), all in HD format. There’s also an audio interview with Yaphet Kotto (7:36). I love it when creators and actors are interviewed about films long after their release, after they’ve become part of the public consciousness, and enough time has passed for the bloom of first love, or critics’ bandwagon hate to have faded. They don’t have to sell the movie anymore; don’t have to play politics, and can speak candidly about the film and the experience. That’s what we get here, five interviews that are candid, insightful, funny and moving, and filled with wonderful snippets of information that you probably didn’t know. I certainly didn’t know that Yaphet Kotto played Mosely as the black Clouseau.

You also get the Original ‘Making Midnight Run’ Promo which is the EPK piece showing clips from the film, and catching quick interviews with the actors and crew on set. It’s also interesting to see a couple of scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut. This lasts 7:26 and is in SD.

Conclusion

If you could bottle it, you’d be a billionaire. Once in a while, the stars align, you get the right script, the right director, the right actors, the right composer, and everything just falls into place to beget a classic movie. If you could understand how this all works, you could get films like this out on a production line, but it falls under that mysterious, indefinable, irresistible force that we call movie magic. Midnight Run is movie magic. It works, brilliantly, emphatically, triumphantly, one of the best movies of the eighties, a period rich with classic movies.


It’s a brilliant action movie, full to the brim with great stunts and set pieces. The story is simple, but effective; it combines the adrenaline of a chase movie with the wonderful vista and character development of a road movie. When it comes to the characters, Midnight Run has an embarrassment of riches, with it seems every character having a story to tell. You have the bail bondsman Eddie Moscone and his assistant Jerry in LA, desperate for Walsh to bring the Duke back. You have Marvin Dorfler as the simple and single-minded blunderbuss of a bounty hunter, always Jack’s rival for bounties, engaged in a tit for tat competition for the Duke. You have the brilliant Alonzo Mosely who wants the Duke so he can testify against the mob boss, and whose insecurity exponentially grows through the film after Walsh steals his ID. You have the mob boss of course, the wonderfully profane, menacing and smooth Jimmy Serrano, as well as his Laurel and Hardy goons Joey and Tony, who all want the Duke dead...


And at the heart of the film, driving it all is the odd couple relationship that develops and grows between ex-cop turned bounty hunter Jack Walsh, and white colour Robin Hood criminal Jonathan Mardukas. Walsh hates his job, wants one last score so he can get out, and away from the scumbags who try and blow his brains out rather than be captured, and a simple accountant would seem to be an easy way to score $100,000. Except Mardukas is infuriating in a whole other way, principled enough to steal from the bad and give to the needy, and harbouring a philosophy on life that he insists on imparting to his new captor as they travel cross country. What starts off as an initial antagonism slowly twists and distorts until they begin to resemble an old married couple, trying to find ways to annoy and niggle each other, even while they’re running from the FBI, the Mob, and Marvin. Then there is Danny Elfman’s score driving the pace of the film, with wonderful character themes and of course the memorable theme tune, all of which is another character in itself. Somehow one of the most engaging action movies of the eighties also turns out to be one of the funniest comedies of the eighties.


It does make you wonder just why Midnight Run didn’t explode into the consciousness the way it should have, why aside from three loosely related TV movies, there were no Midnight Runs 2, 3, 4 and so on setting box offices alight in the nineties... One other titbit I picked up from the extras is that Midnight Run opened on the same day as another, small, insignificant movie, a former TV star’s first attempt at cracking the silver screen, called Die Hard. The fate of opening nights aside, Midnight Run is one of the best movies of the eighties, still one of my favourites, and seeing it in high definition is surely a treat. This Blu-ray is must own disc...

At least it would be for me, were it not for the out of sync audio. Second Sight have looked at the disc and found that the waveform is correctly matched up, and I also asked another reviewer to take a look, again with the correct outcome, so this looks like one of those player incompatibility things. If you have a Panasonic SC BTT 490 Home Cinema, be wary.