The Action/Adventure Section — A regular column that will exclusively highlight and review action movies. The most likely suspects? Action cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. But no era will be spurned. As the column grows, the intent will be to re-capture the whimsy of perusing the aisles of your local video store with only ragingly kick ass cover art to aide you in your quest for sweaty action glory. Here we will celebrate the beefy. This is a safe place where we still believe that one lone hero can save humanity by sheer force of will and generous steroid usage.
There was always something missing in my life; a hole that couldn’t quite be filled in.
And then I saw 1991’s Ricochet, starring Denzel Washington and directed by Russell Mulcahy. How could I ever have known that the hole missing from my heart was shaped like John Lithgow, covered in duct taped phone book armor, sword fighting Jesse Ventura in a prison?
Because yes, that happens in this movie. And it was as though I had seen the light.
I know what you might be thinking, because once there was a time when I thought this way too. “Ricochet, isn’t that just a cop movie? Isn’t that an early nineties Denzel star vehicle of the generic thriller variety? A low rent Pelican Brief, perhaps?” And while all the marketing imagery for this film hinges on a uniformed, fresh faced Denzel caught in a man to man standoff with John Lithgow… this is also early nineties Russell Mulcahy we are talking about here. The man who brought us the original Highlander, which, if you haven’t revisited in a while… is even more bugnuts than you remember. But not only was it directed by Mulcahy in his prime, it was also partly written by two huge fan favorites, Steven E. De Souza (Die Hard, Commando) and Fred Dekker (Director of The Monster Squad and Night Of The Creeps). The third credited writer, Menno Meyjes, wrote The Color Purple and gets story credit for Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Here are some gentlemen who know how to entertain.
And entertain they will. Ricochet is a film that gives and gives, wringing every last drop of entertainment and class that it possibly can right out of its script and directly into your eyeballs. I mentioned the prison sword fight. That doesn’t seem to fit into your mental framework if you’re still thinking of Ricochet as a cop thriller does it? Probably not. That’s why I’m here writing this. Somehow, as a culture, we missed the boat on Ricochet. This is one of the most over the top, tastelessly R-rated, kitchen sink cult movies I’ve honestly ever seen… and we need to be talking about Ricochet.
You see, back in the 90s, there used to be wildly entertaining, widely released, studio-produced, mid-budget films starring A-list actors which had something called an “R-rating”. In this mystical time, you got to see things such as Denzel Washington confronting gang leader Ice-T with a pin-pulled grenade, or a heroine-riddled Denzel being straddled by a prostitute at the bottom of an emptied-out swimming pool, or a crazed Denzel putting on lipstick amidst a chaotic “I’m going to jump off this building in front of this crowded media circus” sequence followed immediately by that building exploding… “and you won’t believe what happens next”.
Ricochet does start out with a fresh-faced, uniformed Denzel Washington (playing Nick Styles) becoming somewhat of a pre-YouTube viral sensation when he resolves a hostage situation at a carnival by stripping down to his boxer shorts and yet still managing to pull out a hidden gun to injure John Lithgow… all on amateur video! Years pass by as Lithgow’s appropriately 3-named killer Earl Talbot Blake (seriously, have 3 names ever been strung together that sound MORE like someone who plans to kill a ranking politician?) rots in prison and plots his revenge. Which somehow involves sword-fighting Jesse Ventura. Which I can’t stress enough. Styles has become a successful district attorney over the years, and Blake has built an impressive shrine of Styles clippings and newspaper headlines around his cell which none of the prison authorities deem worthy of noting or possibly reporting to Styles. And thus, after faking his own death and escaping prison, Blake sets into motion a cat and mouse movie which exceeds every possible boundary of logic or good taste in its commitment to entertaining you.
I adore this movie, and genuinely feel that rush that can only come from discovering something so exciting that you desperately want to show other people. The definition of a “you have to see it to believe it” type of affair, the crazy sequences I’ve described above of Denzel putting on lipstick while threatening to jump off a building or stripping to his skivvies on video tape or leveraging the thug army which Ice-T commands via threat of a live grenade are merely a few tantalizing tidbits I’ve laid out to bait you. There’s more. So much more. Ricochet is perhaps more due for a re-discovery and cult following than any movie I’ve ever seen, and I mean that in the sense that, as a whole, we’ve categorized this movie entirely incorrectly. Ricochet is no mere cop thriller, folks. This is prime Mulcahy, ratcheting up the crazy at every turn, with the always sensational (and usually way classier) Denzel Washington at the center of the camera’s gaze. Hell, even Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner shows up in this thing. Kevin Pollack is in the mix as well. And daggonit, if I haven’t sold you on seeking this movie out yet, I guess the only thing I can leave you with is this:
And I’m Out.
Except for this…
