Thoughts on One False Move

On Criterion I watched a 1992 thriller called One False Move, in which Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) and Pluto (Michael Beach) are two drug dealers who murder several people in a house in L.A. and run off with Ray’s accomplice girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams), aka Lila, going to her Arkansas hometown, where two L.A. cops and Hurricane (Bill Paxton), a local sheriff, are waiting to catch them.

It’s a really tense thriller, as Thornton plays this easily paranoid tweaker with a bad ponytail who goes off at any second, while Beach is quiet and bespectacled, but can quickly get stabby without warning. The murder scenes are quick but pretty brutal to watch. Lila goes ahead of them to her hometown, in part to see her five-year old son and confront Hurricane, who is small-time but eagerly sees this case as his big score to bust some real criminals. He’s also casually racist, which gets pretty awful when he has this likable charm then just drops a racial slur that kills it immediately. And as Lila is Black, it does bring up some dynamics between them where she does outright call him out on his racism, as deservedly so.

I re-listened to the podcast Switchblade Sisters, which talked about this movie in 2019, and it brought up more interesting points about the film, namely the character of Fantasia/Lila, and how she starts off the film as seemingly the passive girlfriend (it took me a little time to realize she was Ray’s girlfriend and not a hostage from the mass murder), but gains more agency in her character arc, quietly manipulating her boyfriend to get ahead and complete her own business, and is a much stronger heroine in the end, who morally is a lot more innocent and good than her co-horts are. I’m trying not to give away too much, but her confrontation with Hurricane about past events and his racist attitudes cut deep, and I loved that she is blunt and unafraid of him, and he comes off as more cowardly in her presence.

I thought Cynda Williams did well in this film, especially in that sequence with Paxton, but feel like a stronger actress could have made more of a presence in the film. Not as a typical noir heroine, because she isn’t, she comes off as quiet for most of the film. But just as someone who could have made a bigger impression in an underrated film. I just realized that I was praising the male actors mostly before her, and wanted to give her more acknowledgment.

I was pleasantly surprised that this got on Criterion, because I just heard of it last year from a film podcast, and it seemed like a really hard to find movie that likely didn’t do well at the time of release and didn’t get much play. It’s a really well-acted and uncomfortable film to watch, as you can just feel like any of the characters will snap and panic and get violent at any trigger. Fun trivia fact: Thornton and Williams were married after the film wrapped in 1990, but were divorced by the time it came out in 1992.