Ricochet (1991)

Starring: Denzel Washington, John Lithgow, Ice-T, Kevin Pollack, Mary Ellen Trainor, John Amos, Jesse Ventura, Miguel Sandoval, and George Cheung
Grade: B-

John Lithgow has had an interesting career. Only this guy can be menacing enough to believably oppose Sylvester Stallone (Cliffhanger), Denzel Washington, and John Travolta (Blow Out) and then out of nowhere play the patriarch of a family of extraterrestrials in 3rd Rock from the Sun.

Summary

In 1983 Los Angeles, rookie police officer and law student Nick Styles (Washington) and his partner Larry Doyle (Pollack) play two-on-two basketball against Nick’s childhood friend and drug dealer Odessa (Ice-T) and his friend R.C. (Lydell M. Cheshier). After some initial struggles, Nick and Larry win and take home some money as a result. Before Odessa and R.C. leave, Nick notices the evidence of hotwiring and tells him they’re not playing ball with each other anymore. The whole time, some women were watching, including Alice (Victoria Dillard). Following some flirting, he jokingly gives her a ticket and offers a spot to meet up, so she can try and get out of it. Later that night, Nick and Larry are on duty at some carnival. In a building nearby, there’s a drug deal going down between Vargas (Sandoval) and Huey (George Cheung). Professional hitman Earl Talbot Blake (Lithgow) and his young accomplice Kim (Josh Evans) crash the party, and Blake kills them all and takes the money. Nick and Larry hear the gunshots and spring into action.

Oddly enough, not one person at this carnival hears the gunshots. I’m not even sure how this is possible. The public only takes notice once Blake jumps out the window and crashes to the street below.

As Nick approaches Blake, Larry fights Kim. Blake takes a hostage and demands Nick get rid of his gun. As Nick holds up his gun and talks to Blake, he strips to his underwear to show he doesn’t have any other weapons nor a bulletproof vest. He offers to take the woman’s spot as a hostage so she can leave, but Blake still demands he drop the gun. As Nick lays the gun down, Blake lets the girl go, but he immediately tries to shoot Nick. Nick shoots him in the knee first with a backup gun and subdues him, just as Larry arrests Kim. The entire situation with Nick and Blake is recorded by a bystander during the heat of the moment, and it makes Nick a media sensation.

Sometime after, some higher-ups discuss where to go next with how Nick handled the situation. Chief Elliott Floyd is mad Nick endangered civilians, but District Attorney Priscilla “The Hun” Brimleigh (Lindsay Wagner) argues it’s the first amount of positive publicity Elliott’s department has had in three years, and he should milk the hell out of it. Priscilla, Elliott, and city councilman Farris (John Cothran, Jr.) approach Nick in the police department locker room. As Priscilla speaks to the completely naked Nick, she asks him where he managed to hide the gun that he used to shoot Blake in the knee. After he shows her where he placed it in his jock strap, Priscilla introduces him to the other two guys and tells Nick that him and Larry have been promoted to Detective. In the prison hospital, Blake replays the moment he had with Nick over and over again. After interacting with a guy that gives books to the prisoners, he fumes seeing the press conference Nick speaks at.

Eight years later, Nick has graduated law school and is about to become LA’s new Assistant District Attorney. Blake is moved to a new prison that Kim is at. He gets placed in a cell with Jake Chewalski (Ventura), as the guard assumes Chewalski is going to kick his ass. However, after some back-and-forth shit talking, Blake ends up beating his ass instead. Immediately after, Blake gets comfy in his bunk and puts up a newspaper headline of Nick’s most recent job as a prosecutor. Elsewhere, Larry drives Nick home. They discuss “The Night Strangler” case they’re both involved in and how Larry promises to find the missing witness. Nick gets inside his house, and we see that he’s now married to Alice, and they have two daughters. Back in prison, Blake fights Chewalski in medieval-like garb for the backing of the rest of the Aryan Brotherhood that are watching. Blake kills Chewalski after seeing his makeshift armor had Blake’s newspaper headline of Nick attached to him. Immediately following this, Blake makes a partnership with the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood in Jesse (Rick Cramer), and both men hatch a plan for a potential escape. Afterwards, Kim tries to suck up to him, but Blake stops him, grabs the bloody newspaper with Nick on it, and tells him to clean it up and save it for him. Back in the real world, Nick does a wonderful job in swaying the jury, along with Larry helping by finding the missing witness, and Nick wins the high-profile “Night Strangler” case. Upon leaving the courthouse, Farris approaches Nick and tries to convince him to move into politics, but Nick insists he’s a prosecutor and nothing else.

Following this, we see Blake get his wounds tended to with the prison doctor, as Kim discreetly switches his file around with another patient. As this is happening, he watches Nick on the television at another press conference.

Right after Nick gets his daughter baptized, he has to leave early because he has a meeting at the bank about the community youth center. Back in prison, Blake prints numerous pictures and closeups of Nick. Kim is released but before he leaves, he promises to take care of Blake when he gets out. At night, Nick visits Odessa in a crack house. Now, Odessa is the man in South Central and is a big-time drug dealer. The reason Nick came over was to plead with him to not sell drugs, recruit, or do anything else gang-related near the youth center he’s working on. Odessa refuses, despite Nick reminding him how close they were, as well as their families. As a result, everyone points a gun at Nick. Unafraid, Nick holds up a grenade and pulls the ring while making an impassioned speech to plead with Odessa, showing and telling everyone he’s not scared to die either. After all this, he’s able to convince him. Once he leaves the house and goes to a waiting Larry, he lights his cigarette with the grenade, revealing that it’s actually a lighter. The next day, Blake goes in for his parole hearing and soon after asking what he will do once he leaves prison, it snowballs into Blake and Jesse’s Aryan Brotherhood killing and attacking almost everyone in the room. They take the clothes of the board members, and Blake holds his lawyer (who took the case pro-bono) at gunpoint to help him get out of the gate with ease, along with a few Aryans in tow.

As they get close to the van to escape without a hitch, the book guy from the hospital recognizes Blake and greets him, forcing Blake to kill him in the open. The disguised Aryans follow suit, killing all the outside guards, and they escape in the van soon after. On a cliff somewhere, Jesse and Blake meet up with Kim, and Jesse notes that Blake has a week to clear up his stuff with Nick before they meet up with the passports and money agreed upon. Instead, Blake shoots and kills Jesse and shoots him a second time in the knee, giving him the same wound that he has because of Nick. After setting the van on fire, Blake and Kim push it off a cliff. Reporter Gail Wallens (Trainor), a character from Die Hard no less, tells Nick about the Blake news. She has heard Blake is believed to be dead because the body that was burnt to a crisp had Blake’s signature knee wound that Nick gave him during their encounter years ago. As Nick and Farris walk away and Farris turns some homeless guy away who begs him for money, Nick gives the guy some. After they leave, the homeless guy takes off his disguise to reveal the very much alive and vengeful Blake.

With the public thinking he’s dead, he now holds all the cards, and Nick is nowhere near prepared to deal with this insanely prepared and vile human being.

My Thoughts:

Ricochet is the other revenge thriller that came out the same year as Cape Fear, a month prior in fact. Many have forgotten about it when discussing the subgenre but nevertheless, it’s a fairly decent battle of wits between lawman and criminal. This is mainly because our two main characters exemplify the two total opposite sides of the law very well, pitting another great heroic protagonist in Denzel Washington against the black-hearted mastermind of John Lithgow.

Nick Styles is a model citizen. Not only did he save a hostage and shoot down the bad guy, making him a superhero of sorts in the eyes of the public, but he’s able to translate this success to become the Assistant District Attorney. He’s a good dude who’s loved by his co-workers and the general public. Though he stays busy with his job, he’s a great husband and father too. At one point, he has to leave his daughter’s baptism, orchestrated by his priest father (Amos), furthering his perfect track record. On top of that, the only reason he’s leaving is to go to a meeting about the community youth center he’s helping build. So, though it sucks he has to leave such an important event, it’s still for a good cause. This is why he gets a pass in the eyes of the viewer. This guy can do no wrong. Nick works hard and seemingly does everything right and for the right reasons. In fact, it’s so good that one slip-up in his life could change people’s perceptions of him. If something bad happens, the public would pounce on him. This sets us up perfectly for Blake’s revenge tour. There’s not a single redeeming quality about Earl Talbot Blake. He’s a wicked man through and through. We know this pretty early on but if you wanted a good line to remind you, the meeting with the parole board was all we needed. The one guy asks him what he would plan to do if he got out and Blake takes his time to answer eloquently:

Blake: “Well, I guess Mr. Chairman, that first I’d pay a visit to your house.”

Chairman: “To thank me, I suppose.”

Blake: “No, to fuck your wife…and your daughter. Hell, maybe even your dog”.

Then, he smiles ear-to-ear to really send it home.

For a 90s action movie, I wasn’t expecting a wild line like that. It felt like nothing was off the table to sell Blake’s villainy to the audience. Following this, Blake kills the Chairman and when the group of Aryans start killing people in the room, they do so in the most brutal ways possible, with one guy using a drill on someone and the other using a saw. It’s game time now. Up until this point, the movie is solid action fare but after this, it’s balls to the wall. This is just a small sample of the dastardly shit Blake has planned for Nick. Once Blake is officially out and about, the movie gets darker and more ruthless because of his elaborate plans to torture Nick and destroy his life. He does everything from dressing Farris in drag after killing him and staging his death as a suicide, while planting evidence on him that implicates him and Nick in a child pornography ring, to taping a video of himself holding an axe over Nick’s children’s heads while they were asleep. The most savage of scenes came in a barren pool somewhere. In a particularly memorable and somewhat graphic sequence, he captures Nick, injects a combined heroin/cocaine substance into him (using the stolen money from the telethon Nick raised), and pays a hooker to fuck him on camera (who gifts him “The Clap” we later find out) as he drifts in and out of consciousness. This allows Blake to later use the tape to make it look like he’s willingly cheating on his wife.

For the record, even when Nick was under the influence, he tried to get her to stop. Thus, still showing us the type of guy Nick is even in the worst of circumstances.

The mind games are endless, and Blake wins for a good portion of the movie. Honestly, I wouldn’t know how to get out of this situation. The only thing I could think of is the audio not matching up on the sex tape because Blake used different audio from a conversation he recorded between Nick and a waitress at a restaurant. As the audio played of Nick talking in his usual voice, you could very clearly see his mouth not moving. This should’ve put him in the clear at the very least, but it doesn’t really matter because everything else still makes him look crazy. Seeing Denzel get as frustrated as he does, flipping out and losing his bearings as he tries to explain himself and what happened after these moments, expands the entertainment value of this film a lot. This is because we have never seen Denzel lose his cool to this extent. We’ve seen him flip out in certain circumstances, but we never see him stammer and get close to losing his mind like he does here. Blake proves himself to be an evil genius. He’s been thinking about the details of this plan for several years and it shows, showcasing on a consistent basis how he is several steps ahead of Nick in almost every direction he thinks or looks (the tape switch was wild). This feeling of having no way out is a major positive coming out of what could’ve been a regular revenge thriller. I also enjoyed the fact that as crazy and dark as things get, it’s still very much believable. I loved when Nick tried to explain the hooker thing to his wife saying, “I tried to fight her with every inch in my body”.

Even I was like, “Come on man! I would even think you’re bullshitting!”.

Seriously, for the most part, everything Blake gets away with doing, in making Nick’s life a living hell behind the scenes, seems entirely plausible. It adds an extra level of terror to this film and this madman antagonist. If it’s any consolation to Lithgow, the villain he plays here is infinitely better than any of the previous villains he has played in action movies. He’s diabolical, with a direct approach and a stop-at-nothing mentality. He could’ve killed Nick a hundred times in this movie with ease. There are a lot of scenes where he’s inches away from Nick or even on the other side of a wall. The thing with Blake is he’s adamant on making Nick suffer, even screaming at the faux suicidal Nick, “No! You have to live and suffer for years!”. He wants to ruin his life. To do that, Nick has to stay alive to be torn apart. THAT is some serious villain shit. When he’s told by the prison doctor to be careful, he says importantly that he will because he’s “got things to live for”. His life will be dedicated to ruining Nick’s. You can’t get much eviler than that. Again, he doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. He’s just rotten to his core. Sometimes, this works in certain contexts. In Ricochet, this is an instance where it works. Never have I felt more helpless in watching a protagonist in an action movie quite like this.

His working relationship with Kim is a bit odd though. It seemed like he was just Blake’s minion who only existed to be yelled at. By the way, did anyone else think Kim reminded them of “The Little Dog” from 2 Stupid Dogs? No? Just me?

As imperfect as they come, Ricochet is a pretty decent revenge thriller, but it’s hampered by a string of issues.

Ice-T’s acting is like a step slow and seems very rehearsed, and the third act is all over the place. I like that Nick goes to Odessa and the drug dealers for help because the sense of danger felt real, but Nick acting like he was going to kill himself once he figured out Blake’s motivations felt off. I understand Denzel was overacting for the purpose of the scene because Nick is trying to convince Blake and the world of his intentions, but it didn’t feel right. The ending fight was way too elaborate for the gritty and grounded buildup too. They set the hero/villain back-and-forth up well enough to where you could’ve gotten away with a brutal fistfight between the two in a warehouse. As long as Denzel beat him down in ultraviolent fashion (something similar to The Narrator beating Angel Face in Fight Club), it would’ve fit the grimy tone of the rest of the movie but would’ve been perfectly satisfying. The ending we got was too large-scale, unrealistic (once the drug dealers started doing “commando shit” as Odessa puts it, I knew something was wrong), and overdone. It was definitive, but it was not the satisfying payoff worthy of the buildup they worked so hard for. We needed to be up close and personal for the final showdown. The world didn’t need to be watching. It wasn’t that type of action movie. This was a personal revenge thriller, and the ending needed to be personal and hard-hitting. I wanted Nick to get more out of it (roping Larry into it wasn’t fair either). Nick lost too much and didn’t gain enough back. Blake deserved a beatdown of a lifetime, but he did way too well against him.

Crucifying Kim, but him not having a scratch on him, felt even more perplexing. That man should’ve looked rough! He’s just as much of a part of this as Blake is!

There are other problems too. We see it almost immediately in the opening sequence, with a very obvious stunt double replacing Denzel Washington in the basketball scenes. Not only did he look glaringly different while showing off his defined six-pack, but he was dunking with ease. I don’t have a problem with a stuntman being used in a sequence like this, but it was so painstakingly obvious that I was already laughing to begin the film. Little production problems like this aren’t game-changing per say, but when it’s this obvious, you’re off to a bad start. There’s a litany of other random questions I had of instances occurring in Ricochet like the medieval fight in prison between Blake and Chewalski. What the hell was that? They got on armor, and they fight each other with spears? When would this ever happen? What kind of prison is this to where this could even happen? Considering the brutality of the rest of the movie, a normal fistfight would have sufficed here and would’ve made a lot more sense.

Then, there’s the early scene where Kim tries to open the door to the drug deal and Blake yells at him because it’s like he’s practically announcing his entrance. However, Blake goes ahead and breaks the glass instead which is significantly louder. What?

Ricochet does the revenge stuff very well. The buildup is good too. Our hero not being able to find a way to defeat this deplorable man creates a real sense of danger for the audience, pulling us deeper and deeper into the action. Washington and Lithgow do a great job playing the opposite sides of the coin. Alas, the rest of the movie can’t put it together. It gets too dark at some points and then has a payoff that would fit a superhero movie rather than the gritty revenge thriller we thought they were making. Plus, there was a myriad of other problems either technical or logistical in terms of the story. Ricochet is worth a watch if you like revenge movies, but one watch is good enough. I don’t think you’ll have the energy to watch it again.

Fun Fact: It was originally written as a Dirty Harry film, but Clint Eastwood deemed it “too grim”. Honestly, I agree with him. This should show you what type of movie you’re dealing with if Eastwood deemed it “too grim” for Harry Callahan. Kurt Russell was later attached to star at one point.