Midnight Run is a great movie from the director of Beverly Hills Cop Martin Brest. It provides Robert De Niro with a chance to show his comic side (don't worry if you like him mean and moody, because he gets to be that too). It also provides Charles Grodin with one of the best roles of his career, mainly because this is not a simple-minded one-dimensional farce but an intricate mixture of gangster thriller, road movie and comedy.<br /><br /> De Niro plays Jack Walsh, a down-on-his-luck bounty hunter working for a very unreliable and sleazy bail-bondsman named Eddie Moscone (Joe Pantoliano). Eddie wants Jack to find an accountant named Jonathan Mardukas (Grodin), a.k.a The Duke. It turns out that The Duke embezzled a few million dollars from the Mob, and now that Eddie has bailed him out of jail he needs to get his money before the Mob can locate and eliminate the Duke. However, Walsh realises that bringing the Duke in is not necessarily to his advantage, because the Mob bigwig from whom he embezzled the money is called Jimmy Serrano (Dennis Farina), an old adversary of Walsh's. Therefore, Walsh senses an opportunity to get one over on his old enemy by using The Duke as bait.<br /><br /> All right, the plot is complicated! But that's not a bad thing, and it's a credit to Brest the writer that he has managed to make his film fairly easy to comprehend, even though there's an awful lot going on. Brest the director deserves a lot of credit too, for drawing dry, witty performances from all his main actors and for delivering some terrific action sequences. The dialogue is great, with lots of snappy and funny interplay between Walsh and The Duke, and some fabulous crudities from rival bounty hunter Marvin Dorfler (John Ashton). There's a heck of a lot of swearing in the film (it might even set a record for the most bad language in a "light" comedy film) but because the actors deliver their lines with wit and relish, the abundance of cursing is surprisingly forgivable.<br /><br /> Midnight Run is an absolute blast. A character-driven action-thriller-comedy which moves at a terrfic pace and has style and energy to spare.