I remember the moderate buzz surrounding it way back when. It came out in the year or so after "Reservoir Dogs," so the whole neo-noir indie thing of that time was just getting started. Directed by an actor and relative nobody named Carl Franklin (a nobody in the sense that he's worked mostly under the radar; in truth, he's done some pretty solid work both behind and in front of the camera) and written by and co-starring a complete nobody named Billy Bob Thornton, "One False Move" was basically a B-movie intended for the direct-to-video bin at your local video store. It wasn't until critics like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel took up the cause that it finally got a small theatrical release (Siskel named it his movie of the year)
In the years since, it's grown into a minor cult artifact, largely because of the stratospheric rise not long after of its writer and star (Thornton would go on to make his breakout "Sling Blade" just a few years later).
It's one of those movies I think about watching every so often and then quickly forget. But it came up while prepping a new script I'm due to start soon, I decided to finally sit down and watch it.
Final verdict: pretty good. It's no masterpiece, but it's a more-than-solid slice of rural noir, and definitely worth a look.
The film mostly centers on a dual, criss-crossing narrative that follows a gang of murderous robbers and drug pushers comprised of the volatile and violent Ray Malcolm (Thornton), his slightly more sensible lover Fantasia (Cynda Williams, who was Thornton's real-life girlfriend at the time), and the coolly psychopathic Pluto (Michael Beach, who should be recognizable to modern audiences as T.O. Cross on "Sons of Anarchy"), and two L.A. cops (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings) who team up with a small-town sheriff (Bill Paxton) in hopes of intercepting the gang upon their arrival in Ray and Fantasia's home town of Star City, Arkansas.
In many ways this is all pretty standard fair. What makes the movie hum are the performances and Thornton's solid, if not wholly original, screenplay. Everyone is good here (Beach, in particular, plays Pluto with just the right mixture of brute menace and cool intelligence), but Paxton steals the show as Dale "Hurricane" Dixon, a small-town cop with big-time dreams. We know from the start that his inexperience, exuberance, and overall lack of intellectual rigor are likely to get him (and maybe a lot of other people) killed. Imagine if George W. Bush was a small-town sheriff about to go up against a gang of cold-blooded murderers.
But lest you think this is simply another Hollywood movie condescending to and fetishizing the rural south, remember that Thornton himself is not so different from Hurricane Dixon. He grew up in this world, and he knows it as more than a bag of clichés. When we meet Dale and first experience Star City, we're taking it all in through the eyes of the jaded and arrogant big-city cops, and Thornton's sly trick is to make the condescension theirs, not the movie's. He fakes us out by putting us into their subjectivity, then pulls the rug out from under us by dumping us right into Dale's. Dale is suddenly more complex, heartfelt, flawed — but inherently noble — than we previously imagined.
Thornton is also pretty great as Ray. It's the type of role we've become accustomed to seeing him in, but it's handy to remind ourselves that, at the time, nobody knew who the fuck he was. Yet he manages to dominate the screen like a seasoned veteran.
The ultimate confrontation between all these forces is powerfully presented, but overall pretty predictable. Nothing here really gives us anything we haven't seen before or since. "One False Move" may be one of the first of those 90s rural noirs, but it's far from the best (that honor goes to either John Dahl's 1993 film "Red Rock West" or Sam Raimi's 1998 film "A Simple Plan" — the latter of which not-so-coincidentally stars both Thornton and Paxton).
Still, this is a movie that's a lot better than in it should be, and that's due to the talent involved. Franklin, for his part, directs the film ably and with just enough style to elevate this beyond other direct-to-video fare from that era. He's not showy, but he shows a solid command over the form.
This is a good movie. If you haven't seen it, you should give it a shot.
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