Why is Denzel Washington attacking a clown, and why is he wearing a pink bathrobe? Is that John Lithgow fighting Jesse Ventura — in prison, with swords? A cop and a criminal point guns at each other, a scene you’ve seen a thousand times, except this cop distracts this criminal by stripping down to his underwear.
I’m talking about Ricochet, a delirious 1991 thriller. I didn’t know the movie existed last week; I’m obsessed now. (It’s streaming on Max.)
Washington is Nick Styles, a regular gorgeous flirty charismatic cop doing night school at UCLA Law. When a bunch of drug dealers get blown away, Nick happens to be strolling the carnival next door. Yes: A gory massacre at a top-secret underworld meeting, mere steps from a Ferris Wheel.
Lithgow plays the dead-eyed murderer, Earl Talbot Blake, who winds up in a standoff with Nick. The bad guy takes a hostage. The good guy takes his clothes off. Nick — this is true — pulls a secret handgun out of his jock, and shoots Earl in the leg. The injured criminal has a butterfly knife. So when Nick knocks him out, he mutters the immortal line: “I guess a Beretta in the butt beats a butterfly in the boot, huh?”
A bystander records the takedown. That videotape makes Nick a hero, fast-tracking his legal career into the DA’s office. Years pass. Nick becomes a happily-married father of two, his family on the cover of Upscale magazine. He is the kind of Los Angeles lawyer I pray actually existed once upon a time, always on TV firing rhetorical salvos at famous maniacs. He hosts a telethon, people love his telethon. He has so, so much to lose. Earl breaks out of prison — he escapes in a Bookmobile — and starts ruining Nick’s perfect life.
Ricochet arrived a month before Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake. It’s another story of a Man Getting Vengeance on the Attorney Who Put Him Away. Cape Fear is pulp prestige, though, a B-movie shot like an A-film. Ricochet is a Z-movie shot like a blockbuster. Earl’s lurid plot involves pedophilia frame-ups, death-by-hanging-in-drag, unwanted heroin, and a venereal disease. No smear campaign ever splotched more smut. But this is a Joel Silver production, so the production is massive and luscious: A building in flames, a man-to-man climbing fight on a national landmark, blood squibs turning whole midsections red.
I found Ricochet by accident. Screen Drafts, the greatest podcast in the world, is about to rank the Highlander franchise on its Patreon. Somehow I never caught the first movie in the franchise, which was directed by Russell Mulcahy years before he made Ricochet. Watching Highlander 1, I felt life begin anew. What a wonder, this glamour-grime urban epic punk fantasy. Back-alley saber duels, the sorrow of eternity, Skinny Jon Polito, Queen.
Do I love Russell Mulcahy? His first feature was Razorback, a shockingly beautiful Giant Killer Warthog movie. He made The Shadow, still the only superhero film where the protagonist starts off as a mass-murdering harem-addled opium lord. Mulcahey’s movie career faded this century (though he was a key producer on Teen Wolf, whose stars were fun to drink with.) His best work embodies a particular subvariant of operatic MTV hardcore: smoke machines, fan-spotlights, the tone somehow nastier and more romantic than anything in today’s mainstream. I yearn for it all, man.
With Ricochet, Mulcahey had a star going supernova. Washington gets to be smooth, brave, brash, trustworthy — a good dad, a sexy politician, pure badassery, a Wrong Man. And he lets loose. Driven to the brink of madness, a disgraced Nick winds up downing liquor talking to the TV that’s talking about him. Then he tackles the clown. Then out comes the lipstick.
The writer, Steven E. de Souza, worked on Die Hard. Cinematographer Peter Levy came right off Predator 2. Both Silver productions, and Ricochet visibly falls into an uncanny valley between high-octane action and ornate horror. Curious timing on this release, no question. In the year of Rodney King, here’s the tale of a Black man in Los Angeles who keeps making violent headlines when random people film him. Don’t come for coherence, but the racial politics have a cuckoo clarity. The establishment (represented by white lawyers and white reporters) turns on Nick. His one true ally is a friend-turned-enemy from the old neighborhood — a drug kingpin played by Ice T. What is their mad plan for stopping Earl and rescuing Nick’s reputation? Suffice it to say, in Ricochet, even the cocaine explodes.