Metacritic reviews

Ricochet is genuinely scary, suspenseful and disturbing in the best sense.

As with other Silver-smithed projects, this one is almost frighteningly competent at bashing heads and pushing all the right buttons.

Washington strikes the right tone of cocksure bravery as it turns into bewilderment, psychosis, and rage as the movie goes through its many wild twists and turns.

Dynamite action. This is a good bet for a night with the lads. And weedy girlies can at least wake up every ten minutes when Denz takes his top off.

If you don't take it seriously, it's a lot of fun.

Despite a disappointingly obvious ending, Ricochet is a brutally entertaining film.

Screenplay [from a story by Fred Dekker and Menno Meyjes] offers unusually good dialog for the smooth-talking Washington and a number of scenes to savor. Pic threatens to become truly absorbing as Lithgow’s brilliant revenge scheme unfolds, but Ricochet soon abandons cleverness in favor of spectacle.

If you like your revenge slow and cliched, you may like Ricochet. The plot, which by now may be too stock even for TV police dramas, is about an escaped convict bent on torturing the cop who put him behind bars. [05 Oct 1991, p.10]

It's staged like something straight out of King Kong with the look of an old 1930s Universal horror movie where the lightning flashes strobe across the undulating coils of tubing in the mad scientist's laboratory. There's a lot of really ugly violence in Ricochet, the kind of images and thoughts that just make you feel scummy to be involved with, no matter how passively.

The screenplay, by Steven E. de Souza (whose credits include the Die Hard movies), contains many glib, obscene wisecracks, plus the misinformation that Anna Karenina was Tolstoy's first book.