Few actors are more fun to watch when they're balancing that fine line between tense realism and outrageous excess than John Lithgow (The World According to Garp, Raising Cain). In the 1991 action-thriller Ricochet, he's more concerned with the fun than the balance, but he somehow makes his stereotypical movie psycho Earl Talbot Blake work for large parts of this otherwise ultimately silly movie. There is an outline of a taut police procedural in here, and Denzel Washington really goes out on a limb in the lead as the flamboyant police officer Nick Styles, but director Russell Mulcahy exhibits a carelessness in his work and the picture becomes more and more ridiculous as it approaches the finish line. Ice-T is rather incompetent in the role as Washington's old rival Odessa, and the rest of the supporting cast aren't much better.
Review of Ricochet
