Action comedies are sorta like the Howard Johnson of movie genres. If you don't know who Howard Johnson was, he was a slugger for the New York Mets who over the course of his career had a fairly pedestrian batting average, but when he connected he'd crush the sh*t out of the ball. So for every action comedy home run like 21 Jump Street, there's considerably more strike outs like This Means War, Knight and Day, and the dreaded Rush Hour.
One of the films that got the balance of thrills and legit laughs right was Midnight Run, a classic by many accounts and a film Hollywood has been trying to get a big screen sequel of for years. The film featured Robert De Niro(in a Golden Globe nominated turn) as a bounty hunter with Charles Grodin as his prisoner. Three awful television sequels followed the 1988 film featuring none of the principle stars, but now it looks like Brett Ratner, director of the aforementioned Rush Hour, will be the man to bring a real follow-up into theaters.
De Niro is expected to reprise his role as Jack Walsh, with Grodin possibly coming out of semi-retirement as Jonathan "The Duke" Mardukas. Grodin hasn't done a film since 2007's The Ex, and surely nobody wants their career to go out on a note like that.
As if the idea of Ratner turning Midnight Run into his standard issue terrible buddy comedy, the script will come from David Elliot and Paul Lovett, writers of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Yikes. Originally, the idea was to have De Niro come back and be dealing with the son of Grodin's character, but with Ratner and new writers on board I expect we'll see a younger cast entirely, with the two older guys in cameos. There's no denying this is right in Ratner's wheelhouse, but does anyone think this is a good idea? [Deadline]
