Great plot structure is easy to overlook, which might be why One False Move has been somewhat lost to time and, until recently, to the unintended consequences of general unavailability on home video. Upon release, the film topped Gene Siskel’s list of the best of 1992 and came close to the same honor for his television co-host Roger Ebert. Even then, the all-thumbs critics were championing an early-May release that went under the radar, grossing only $1.5 million against its $2.5-million budget. Indeed, distributor I.R.S. Releasing nearly sent the film straight to video, until positive word of mouth convinced the studio to send it to theaters. It is entirely possible that time would have been even less kind to this gem, a masterfully unpredictable neo-noir thriller, had that been the outcome.
To call it a neo-noir oversimplifies the multifaceted narrative, which begins as a procedural following a stash of drugs and money, the trio of killers in pursuit of this booty and the law enforcement officials in pursuit of the killers. It’s a plot we had seen countless times before and have seen even more often since. The difference here lay in the screenplay by star Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, which twists our expectations away from the conventional elements and toward concerns of the heart and the conscience. The fateful decisions made throughout are less about the calculation of ruthless killers and more like the flailing of desperate and wounded animals.
The film begins with a savage and shocking act of violence, as the trio make two murderous house calls in Los Angeles over the course of one night. The de facto leader of the group is Ray, a neurotic live-wire with an anger-management problem, played by Thornton in a performance that somehow finds the nuances within a single note of crazed villainy. His partner in crime is Pluto (Michael Beach), a calm, collected psychopath whose inclination toward violence explodes in fits of rage otherwise undetectable behind his unassuming glasses. Finally, there is Fantasia (Cynda Williams), who is dating the manipulative and physically abusive Ray but may well be merely tolerating his presence under duress.
Her name, by the way, is not Fantasia, but the character’s mysterious past, full of regret and dreams deferred (reflected in Williams’ reflective performance), winds up defining much of the plot when it turns away from procedural mode and begins to take inventory of the consequences of those murders. It is not simply that these three begin the film with a murder spree (and almost assuredly kill more people along the way, as is their nature), but that their violent tendencies are both impulsive and, in their minds, utterly necessary to preserve their way of life. Franklin and the screenwriters are working within surprising and constantly evolving “spree killers” material here, in conversation with contemporary films of the era like Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers, but outside of that conversation, as well. Fame would not faze these three, and in accordance with their ruthless world view, they also meet with a fitting end.
There is a fourth primary character: Dale “Hurricane” Dixon, the police chief of Star City, Arkansas, on whom the Los Angeles Police Department detectives, Cole (Jim Metzler) and McFeely (Earl Billings), call to assist in their investigation. He is played by a truly great Bill Paxton as a down-home charmer of a man who to outsiders might appear to be a country bumpkin. One of our first scenes with Dixon is an interview with a potential character witness, an elderly man whose senility offers no help for the chief, and it’s a great moment of comic confusion, played with a toothy grin by an actor who knows exactly what he’s doing. As the big-city detectives discover, Dixon is also ruthless in his own way – specifically, in his meticulous attention to every detail of this case, which, it turns out, collides with his personal life in surprising ways.
The entire middle act is what one expects from a story like this, as Dixon and the detectives trail the criminals on their murder spree through a backwoods of the United States richly brought to life by Franklin (who achieved a similar balance of procedural thriller and regional study in his great 1995 follow-up film Devil in a Blue Dress) and cinematographer James L. Carter. These thriller elements are as urgent and vital to the film’s success as its biggest twist, which unites the characters of Dixon and Fantasia in time for a final showdown with gutting and tragic results.
That showdown is less about the bullets fired than about whom they hit, and when, and what the ramifications might be after the technical end of this story. This is something else that sets One False Move apart from and far above films of its ilk – a flat refusal to boil everything down to a meaningless action-movie shootout. Every aspect of this screenplay, from its characters to its twisting plot to its shocking resolution, has been thoroughly considered and faultlessly executed.
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