In 1991, the director of Highlander (1986) and Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), Russell Mulcahy was attached to Ricochet, an action thriller originally written by Fred Dekker as a Dirty Harry movie that Clint Eastwood would ultimately consider too bleak. With producer Joel Silver and screenwriter Steven E. de Souza ( Die Hard) on board, Ricochet became a suspenseful and outrageous film that follows a young cop and law student Nick Styles (Denzel Washington) who becomes a hero after his arrest of hitman Earl Talbot Blake (John Lithgow) is filmed and televised. While Styles’ career skyrockets as he becomes the Los Angeles D.A. and his family life blooms, Blake plots his prison break, dead set on exacting revenge on the person who put him behind bars.
What ensues is a wild ride, one that includes, but is not limited to, murders staged to look like suicides, planted child pornography, rapes committed by prostitutes, forced drug use, kidnappings and faked deaths. Certain violent scenes were allegedly edited after test screenings due to their graphic nature, but the uncut version never saw the light of day. Both Denzel Washington and John Lithgow excel in this intense and highly disturbing flick that does not hesitate to chew us up and spit us out.
In 1972 a neophyte Spanish media company created a rare platform for artists to explore classic genre imagery with a sophisticated cinematic sensibility.
After Peter Hyams made a successful TV movie called "Goodnight, My Love", producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler approached him with the desire of...
