Before Ricochet became a Denzel Washington thriller it started life as a Dirty Harry sequel, which Clint Eastwood personally passed on. Eastwood was best known for his work in Westerns during the '60s, with the Dollars trilogy marking his movie breakthrough. His next major success was Dirty Harry, a dark 1971 thriller where his titular detective breaks all the rules to catch a serial killer stalking San Francisco. Dirty Harry was a major success and featured several iconic scenes and lines of dialogue, but it was also controversial for its seeming endorsement of police brutality.
The movie was such a success a Dirty Harry sequel was quickly put in development, with Magnum Force arriving in 1973. This follow-up attempted to tackle the accusations against the original head on, with Harry having to take down a group of vigilante officers. The franchise continued for a further three installments, coming to a close with 1988's underwhelming The Dead Pool. Eastwood did mull concepts for a sixth entry, however, with one project later morphing into an original movie.
Writer/director Fred Dekker is best known for cult horror movies Night Of The Creeps and The Monster Squad and was a fan of the "Dirty" Harry character. He felt the movies after Magnum Force didn't work, so he penned Ricochet on spec with the intent of making a Dirty Harry movie - where John Wayne passed on the original - that lived up to the series. The story involved a criminal who Harry arrested years before dedicating his life to destroying the detective once he's released. Sadly, Dekker's hopes of the screenplay becoming a Dirty Harry sequel were quickly dashed.
Clint Eastwood Thought Richohet Was "Too Grim" For Dirty Harry
According to an interview with Dekker at The Flashback Files, his producer Joel Silver sent the spec to Eastwood. The star apparently dismissed the idea as "Too grim," so Ricochet was instead reworked as an original movie. Dekker hoped to direct it himself with Kurt Russell potentially playing the lead, but eventually, Russell Mulcahy (Highlander) signed on while Denzel Washington was cast in the lead. Ricochet wasn't much of a success and appears to be largely forgotten, but the movie is notable for being relentlessly dark and uncomfortable, with John Lithgow (AKA Dexter's Trinity Killer) giving one of his most chilling turns as the psychopath who systematically destroys the life and career of Washington's Nick Styles.
This includes an extended sequence where Styles is kidnapped, tortured, systematically injected with drugs and sexually assaulted. While Styles eventually prevails and kills Lithgow's character, Ricochet has a mean streak rarely seen in mainstream thrillers. Given the bleakness of the end product, it's not a huge surprise Eastwood passed, though Dekker later stated the aforementioned torture and abuse of the main character didn't feature in the Dirty Harry version of the screenplay.