The movie Matt Damon can quote “every line” of
Few actors boast the kind of popularity and cultural pull of Matt Damon. Ever since his arrival on the American cinema scene in the early 1980s, Damon showed promise, but it was towards the end of the next decade that the Massachusetts-born actor announced himself as a Hollywood star with his effort in Good Will Hunting, which he also co-wrote.
From there, Damon never looked back and continued to establish himself as a hero of Hollywood. Countless quality movies have been released with Damon at their centre, including the likes of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saving Private Ryan, The Departed, Syriana, The Martian and Oppenheimer.
It’s no surprise that Damon has been sought out by some of the most notable directors in American cinema such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan. Damon himself is no stranger to the brilliance of other individuals movies either, and he once named his five favourite films of all time in a feature with Rotten Tomatoes.
After discussing the brilliance of The Godfather Part II and Goodfellas, Damon named yet another film starring Robert De Niro as his third selection. However, the movie differs from the themes of his first two picks in that it possesses more of a comic element, Martin Brest’s 1988 action comedy Midnight Run.
“I’m going to put a comedy in there and say Midnight Run,” Damon noted before going to explain why the film was so important to him in his younger years. “That was a movie that in college and in high school, my friends and I could quote probably every line of that movie. So, I haven’t seen it in a few years now, but that was definitely a favourite.”
Midnight Run is a brilliant buddy comedy in which Robert De Nir plays Jack Walsh, a hardened ex-cop come bounty hunter, while Charles Grodin takes on the role of Jonathan ‘The Duke’ Mardukas, a runaway embezzling accountant. The film focuses on Walsh’s being hired to bring Mardukas back to Los Angeles from New York in just five days so he can collect a $100,000 reward.
Going on to express his admiration for Brest’s film, Damon explained that he doesn’t see its viewing as a “one-off”, noting, “You watch it again and again and again. My friends in college, we’re now in our fifties, but we can come up with obscure lines out of that movie and instantly crack each other up through texts.”
According to Damon, Midnight Run is “just a beautifully acted movie” that still makes him laugh even today. Indeed, much of the film’s overall quality is based on the dynamic chemistry between De Niro and Grodin. De Niro had been known mostly for his serious roles but showed a striking versatility in his comic ability, too, delivering deadpan lines with brilliant comic timing.
Grodin, on the other hand, seems to be the straight man of the two, dousing Midnight Run in a seriously dry sense of wit. This kind of dichotomy between the two characters is what made Midnight Run such an excellent entry in the De Niro catalogue, and Damon signed off on his thoughts on the actor by noting, “I put three of his movies in there! I didn’t do that on purpose. I am a huge fan of his, though, and I love him a lot.”
