RICOCHET. Directed by Russell Mulcahy; written by Steven E. de Souza; produced by Joel Silver and Michael Levy for Warner Bros. Starrlng Denzel Washington and John Lithgow. Rated R.
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Too much grisly violence keeps Ricochet from being a really first-rate thriller. That added to a plot with characters that are perhaps a little too perfect.
Washington is Nick, an ambitious cop at the movie's opening, who later becomes a lawyer, a D.A., and a dream candidate for mayor, governor, and who knows what else. Nick is intelligent and photogenic, a perfect mixture of upwardly mobile urbanity and streetwise cool. And Washington's performance can't be faulted if we have to wonder, at least occasionally, if one guy can really be this perfect a hero.
At least Nick's perfection is balanced by Blake (Lithgow), a perfectly evil villain if there ever was one. A hitman that Nick sends to prison, Blake is sociopathic to the core, and smart, to boot. While in the joint, casually maiming or killing any fellow inmate who looks cross-eyed at him, he develops an obsession about getting even with Nick.
Following his nemesis' rise to fame through newspaper and TV stories, he finally engineers a bloody escape and embarks on a fiendishly clever scheme to wreck the perfect world that Nick has fashioned for himself.
The two lead performances are flawless. Lithgow is an even better villain than he is a nice guy, and he brings an extra "something" to this role, just as he always does. This time, though, it's an extra helping of unadulterated evil.
And Washington does a great job with Nick. He's equally convincing when he has the world by the tail, and when he's under siege from the demented Blake.
The story is more interesting than most of the action-packed shoot-'em-ups and chop-'em-ups that it resembles most of the time. It brings up some thoughtful points about the influence of the media on politics and society, for example. And about the relationship between official and underground power structures.
But the moviemakers got carried away with the shooting and chopping. The body count is excessively high, and the gruesome array of weaponry (power tools, monumental sculpture, and, of course, tons of automatic ordnance) just makes it worse.
The thoughtful points could have been made, and the movie would have been much better, without so much gore.
November 6, 1991