Paul Thomas Anderson names the greatest action movie ever made: “The total package”
Ah the buddy comedy. It’s tried and it’s tested and it has produced some of the best movie moments in history. Remember Nick Frost failing to jump a fence in Hot Fuzz? The snowball fight in Dumb and Dumber? The Rock and Samuel L. Jackson jumping off the building in The Other Guys?
All legendary scenes, and if you can add some action into the mix then you’re truly onto a winner, as directing icon Paul Thomas Anderson knows all too well.
That’s because one of his favourite all-time movies is the 1988 Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro romp Midnight Run, a film that brilliantly blends the mob with laugh-out-loud action and thrilling drama, a mix of Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Donnie Brasco.
It tells the story of De Niro’s character, a freelance bounty hunter, who is dispatched to track down and capture a mob accountant (Grodin) before the FBI can get to him, leading to a chaotic road trip and an immense amount of very amusing frustration on De Niro’s part.
It’s a superb genre mash-up, a fascinating glimpse into America in the late 1980s and contains a pair of hilariously opposed performances from Grodin and De Niro. It’s a film that Anderson has attempted to channel to some extent with his latest effort, One Battle After Another, which hits cinemas next month starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
An action-thriller following a former revolutionary trying to track down his missing daughter, it marks the first time Anderson and DiCaprio have worked together, and both are united in their praise of the 80s movie, which Beverly Hills Cop’s Martin Brest directed.
Anderson told Esquire: “If it’s a Saturday and I’m flipping around thinking, What do I want to watch? chances are I’m going to land on something that has some kind of action-adventure element to it. The first thing that pops to my mind is Midnight Run. I’ve been dreaming of trying to make a film as fun as Midnight Run since I first saw it… It’s the high-water mark of a great film for a broad audience… it’s the total package.”
And DiCaprio, who hasn’t been seen on the big screen since going head-to-head with De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Flowers of the Killer Moon in 2023 agrees, outlining just what an effect the comedy had on him as a youngster.
He added: “I was recently talking about that movie, and a very famous comedian was like, ‘That may be the greatest fucking two-man comedy ever done. It’s brilliant.’ When my dad was telling me about what acting is, he took me to the theater in Burbank to watch Midnight Run. He said: ‘You want to be an actor, son? That’s the guy right there—that’s acting.’”
Anderson’s last movie was Liquorice Pizza, a comedy-drama set in 1970s small-town America that critics loved but audiences didn’t quite as much; it was about half an hour too long and had a somewhat meandering storyline.
Since then he has only directed music videos, including two for Radiohead shoot-off The Smile and one for Haim, whose band member Alana starred in Licorice Pizza and will be seen again in One Battle After Another.
DiCaprio, meanwhile, is immersing himself fully in producing and executive producing, with an involvement in almost twenty upcoming projects, including a film about the founder of video games giant Atari and a new Scorsese movie about a serial killer in 1800s Chicago named The Devil in White City.
