Stay Tuned #51: Midnight Run For Your Life

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster,

Representing the Lolipop Guild.

In my review of Midnight Runaround and the last Ticket Stubs, I referred to today's movie review as "Midnight Run For Your Life: Helium Edition." That's because at the time of this writing, the Midnight Run Action Pack movies are only available to watch in poor quality on YouTube. Another Midnight Run and Midnight Runaround are in decent, but not upscaled, resolution, with a sort of tinny, murky sound quality that begs to be improved upon for some kind of WalMart Quadrilogy Anniversary all-in-one collection or something. But for some reason, the final entry in the franchise, Midnight Run For Your Life, is on YouTube with the beginning and ending hacked off so that it lands at a little over an hour long, and has been pitched up to make everyone sound like helium-huffing forest creatures.

I have no logical segue from munchkins and chipmunks to my usual call of action, so please make Just the Ticket part of your midnight run by remembering to Become A Ticketholder for life if you haven't already, post your high-voiced non sequiturs in the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help with my loan repayment, and follow me from coast to Cabo on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

With the beginning and ending cut off and the voices pitched up for copyright compliance (I guess?), it is difficult to accurately judge the pacing or the intended tone of the film, but just like Another Midnight Run and Midnight Runaround, Midnight Run For Your Life was broadcast in 1994 and stars Christopher McDonald as Jack Walsh, Dan Hedaya as Eddie Moscone, and John Fleck as the idiotic Jerry Geisler. Rival bounty hunter Marvin Dorfler (previously played by Ed O'Ross in this TV trilogy and in the theatrical original by John Ashton) is only mentioned by name and does not make an appearance in this final entry. Also, directing duties go to X-Files, Miami Vice, and Law & Order (plus many handfuls of other TV creative and financial credits) producer-director, Daniel Sackheim, with a script by Shaun "Da Doo Ron Ron" Cassidy. Yes, I'm serious.

And the plot seems to be pretty serious, too...kind of. I probably missed the usual amount of "here's why Jack Walsh is still a scumbag with a heart of gold...again!" time-wasting in the cut-off opening, so his motives of financial desperation--if any--are seemingly absent. The focus this time is mainly on LA waitress and wannabe actress Lorna Bellstratten (Melora Walters, who starred with Charles "The Duke" Grodin in Beethoven two years earlier), who is tricked into delivering a bomb (which has some decent-for-90s-TV explosion effects behind it) to an undercover cop by her drug dealer boyfriend, Michael Vega (NYPD Blue and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives star Vincent Guastaferro). A mistake leads to Lorna surviving, and being blamed for, the bombing, so she goes into hiding in Cabo San Lucas so she can "go out in style" when the hitman she hired comes to kill her. But this is still a Midnight Run movie, so things get complicated for her when Jack Walsh (hired by Vega, who was pretending to be Lorna's deadbeat father), Vega's goons, and the police all come looking for her with different motives on their minds.

I have nothing concrete to base this on, but with the mafia involvement and Lorna being the bounty here, I got the impression that this script might have been based on the original Midnight Run from back when Cher was attached to the project.

Jack beats everyone else to the punch, so when he shows up in Cabo to collect Lorna, she thinks he's the hitman she hired to kill herself, and a lot of mistaken identity and miscommunication shenanigans ensue, turning the "usual" Midnight Run antagonistic buddy formula into a strange and darkly funny romance between the relatively strait-laced and charming Jack and the ambitious but fatalistic Lorna. I didn't get to see how things played out all the way because the last fifteen to twenty minutes were also hacked off for YouTube's sake, but I liked the fresh direction--for the franchise, at least--that this movie took, and McDonald and Walters have good chemistry here.

Unfortunately, I can't give Midnight Run For Your Life an honest rating. But I liked what I did see and hear of it enough to want to see the rest in some kind of boxed set re-release (or at least give it a resolution update for streaming on Peacock?) in the future.

One last time, please make Just the Ticket part of your midnight run by remembering to Become A Ticketholder for life if you haven't already, tell me I'm the bomb in the comments section at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read to help with my loan repayment, and follow me from coast to Cabo on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Bailing Out.