Midnight Run (1988)

Midnight Run sends a bounty hunter named Jack Walsh across the country with an accountant named Jonathan Mardukas in handcuffs, pursued by the mob, the FBI, and a rival in the same trade. The picture runs on irritation that slowly ripens into respect. The studio once proposed rewriting Mardukas as a woman and casting Cher to supply what its executives called sexual overtones. Martin Brest declined, and the film stayed a story about two men learning to tolerate each other. That decision keeps romance off the table, and nothing in the finished product reaches for it anyway. The result is a road trip with excellent bickering.

Yaphet Kotto plays the FBI agent Alonzo Mosely with weary authority, and the film never asks him to explain his presence. He is a professional doing a job, and the script treats him as such. The same goes for the racial and gender composition of the cast, which reflects the conventions of 1988 without commentary or apology. The plot's engine is an embezzlement: fifteen million dollars lifted from a Chicago mobster and given to charity. This is a crime, not a thesis. Nobody in the film argues that the wealthy deserve less. They argue about jurisdiction, custody, and who collects the fee.

The moral center is a wristwatch and a money belt. Walsh gives away the watch his ex-wife gave him, and Mardukas hands over three hundred thousand dollars as a gift, not a payoff. These are gestures of private decency, offered without a lecture attached. Roger Ebert observed that the film earns its closing scene of intimacy, which is the highest compliment available to a comedy about handcuffs. There is no messaging here, no instruction, no moment where a character turns to the camera and explains how we ought to live. The film wants to get from New York to Los Angeles, and it does. A clean sheet, and a rare one.