had a lot to prove in the 1990s. He took the world by storm in the ‘80s, receiving an Oscar nomination for his role as the Apartheid-era activist Steve Biko in Cry Freedom and winning an actual trophy for his role as a Civil War-era soldier in Glory. Like other actors who started strongly in their careers, he now had to show everyone that he wasn’t just a flame on a piece of paper.

Washington went on to dominate the ‘90s with Malcolm X, The Pelican Brief, Philadelphia, Crimson Tide, Courage Under Fire, and The Bone Collector, but he also starred in many films that never became popular. One of them was the action crime thriller, Ricochet, released in 1991. The film was put together by Russell Mulcahy, who had built a name for directing music videos for artists like Elton John and Duran Duran. The high-octane flick also happened to be set in the same universe as John McTieman’s Die Hard.

Upon joining the LAPD, Nick Styles (Denzel Washington) understandably keeps some distance between himself and his childhood friend Odessa (Ice-T). Tired of his days of squalid living, the latter has chosen to become a drug dealer in South Central Los Angeles. For Styles, the decision to stay in the legal lane and cut off all the weeds in his life pays off as his career takes an upward trajectory.

Things get even better when Styles at a carnival. Caught on camera by an amateur videographer and televised, . His life is now set — or is it? No. What Styles doesn’t know is that his actions have put him on a collision course with danger, and his future is about to be a bit rockier than anticipated.

Eight years later, Styles is revealed to have enjoyed even more career progress. But Blake had never forgotten what happened. Behind bars, the criminal allies himself with the Aryan Brotherhood and plots a major escape so that he can get his revenge against Styles. He eventually .

On the outside, Blake gets busy. He carefully n. He first abducts the lawman outside his home and holds him hostage in an empty swimming pool for over a week. Blake then repeatedly injects him with drugs until he becomes zombie-like. He then hires a prostitute to sleep with him while he is impaired with the drugs and records the incident. Blake later releases the unconscious Styles, throwing him on the steps of City Hall. An undercurrent of tension is felt as these events unfold, and we realize this isn’t just the usual torture and dump. The villain might have more on his mind.

Blake. Additionally, it is revealed that Styles has tested positive for gonorrhea, an outcome that causes fissures in his marriage. Nothing could have prepared our protagonist for a vengeful criminal on the lam. Desperate and eager to clear his name, Styles turns to none other than his old friend Odessa to help him track Blake. Will he reverse all the misfortunes that have played out in his life?

In Die Hard, . Detective John McClane, who had just entered the building hoping to reconcile with his estranged wife at a Christmas party held by her employer, tries to save the day. Amid the chaos,.

Enter Ricochet. As the existential circumstances get thicker, the mellow naturalism starts to pave the way to a dusky stylization that is unnervingly redolent of Golden Age film noirs. We realize that things are getting worse for Styles, and guess who shows up to report on his fall from grace? None other than Gail Wallens. Her presence is consistent with the "Strawman News Media" trope that is all too common in Hollywood. . This is hardly surprising, considering that .

Beyond that, Ricochet. In the climactic finale, Rick wears a dirty vest like McClane and uses a semi-automatic Beretta 92 police-issued firearm, which just happens to be the same weapon that the Bruce Willis character uses. Stephen de Souza clearly knew what he was doing, but it would have been even cooler if he had gone a step further by having McClane brought up during a conversation.

For Denzel Washington, Ricochet was. Action-packed crime thrillers were in vogue at the time, so the Glory star felt it wise to jump on this train, too. It was a bold move that didn’t quite pay off the way he might have wanted. Even though the film was praised by critics, resulting in a 75% Rotten Tomatoes score, it performed poorly at the box office, and never came to be considered one of the greatest action movies of the ‘90s.

Thankfully, Washington never gave up on the genre. Any other actor would have pulled a reverse and stuck to what they knew best, but the Malcolm X star kept trying. Consequently, we got memorable films like Man on Fire and The Equalizer series.

Ricochet could have been a Dirty Harry installment if fate had played out differently. (best known for RoboCop 3). Unfortunately for him, . Dekker told The Flashback Files that Eastwood deemed the plot "too grim":

"I'm a huge Eastwood fan. He's one of my favorite movie stars. I think that the Dirty Harry character was lightning in a bottle because after the first two, the rest of the movies just weren't up to snuff. So, I thought I would write a spec script .My producer Joel Silver claims to have sent it to Clint. He said that Clint thought it was "too grim" for him.”

Dekker gave up on the project after he also failed to convince his preferred actor, Kurt Russell, to take on the lead role. , who retained the base premise and rewrote several subplots.

"There were about five seconds when I was going to direct it/ I met with Kurt Russell about playing the cop ... Before I went into that office, I should have said: 'I have to convince Kurt Russell to do this movie!' But I failed to win him over."

Eastwood’s reaction to the script is somehow surprising, considering that Ricochet . It has a classic heist Cop Vs Criminal setup, complete with the obligatory quota of high-adrenalin action set-pieces, and an off-kilter approach to personal lives that somehow makes it feel joyously fresh.

Likely, Eastwood had simply grown tired of the franchise, especially after the poor reviews and dismal box office performance of Dirty Harry: The Dead Pool. After five movies, he might have felt it was time to retire the character.

It's also likely that Ricochet would have been more popular had one of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers not released a similar movie months later. In 1991, the Martin Scorsese movie, Cape Fear, came out, telling a near identical story of an attorney being stalked by a psychopath, who returns from prison to exact revenge. That particular film was nominated for several awards and grossed $182 million at the box office.

This was no shocker. Via his film, Scorsese made an exhibit about how this job ought to be done. He gathered all the familiar genre trappings, used them as a pretext for a weirdly meticulous character study, in which he dissected the psychologies of his villain and hero with the dedicated expertise of an elderly pathologist performing a headline-defining post-mortem. The Denzel Washington film could have benefited from similar treatment. This isn’t to say it is inferior. It’s worth any action fan’s time, so slot it into your schedule if you can.