One False Move - aka: One Flat Movie

Have you ever had this experience? You click on to your NetFlix account to see just how out of control your queue has become, and right there on the screen it says “Ms. Movie-watcher, based on your recent rentals and ratings, here are some movies you may like:” Then it gives you a list of movies, half of which you’ve already seen and rated. So you browse through them, thinking, “Well, if this is based on my personal ratings, these must be movies that I, Ms. Movie-watcher, will like!” So you put them on your queue, only to discover that you have really bad taste. This was my experience with the 1991 movie One False Move.

After seeing that fateful NetFlix recommendation, I checked out the description of the movie. Starring Bill Paxton. Loved him in Frailty. Starring Billy Bob Thornton. Loved those two together in A Simple Plan. Sounds good. Sounds can be deceiving.

One False Move begins with a woman being dropped of at a friends house. The woman, Fantasia (Cynda Williams) is welcomed with open arms at what looks to be a birthday party. It is also clear that everyone there is glad that she is alone and not with “Ray”. Soon Fantasia excuses herself, only to reveal that her presence is a set up. Ray (Thornton) and his partner Pluto (?) (Michael Beach) storm in and begin violently attempting to extract information out of the others present. Once the information is obtained, Pluto watches the party folks while Ray, with Fantasia in tow, goes off to complete the planned drug rip-off. In the process of these events, Ray and Pluto leave a wide swath of death and destruction, some of it very gruesome.

The movie then jumps to a small town in Arkansas, where Dale “Hurricane” Dixon (Paxton) has been sheriff for six years. Seems our bad guys may be headed that way, as the LAPD has made a connection between a relative of Ray and the small town. Dale is just about as excited as he can be at the thought of being in on this case. He is the modern day equivalent of Andy Griffith, the small town sheriff who has never drawn his gun. He also, however, has a healthy dose of Barney Fife thrown in for good measure. He’s itching for the big case, overly confident in his ability to catch the bad guys.

The two stories parallel each other for most of the movie. We learn more about all the characters as Ray, Pluto and Fantasia head east, and Dale waits for them, along with two cops from LA (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings). The two story lines inevitably collide, as surely they must.

First, I’m going to tell you what is good about One False Move. Co-written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, the dialogue has a fairly nice flow. Especially in the small town story. Bill Paxton plays the sheriff as just the right combination of overly eager semi-dufus and knowledgeable small town policeman with a lot to offer the investigation. Paxton does a great job of showing Dale’s puppy dog naivete without making him into a complete laughing stock. Both Billings and Metzler also fair well in their roles as the LA policemen. They like, and also mock, Dale for his aspiration to greater things.

The other performance of note is that of Michael Beach. His Pluto is cold and scary, and he never backs off of that tone. His performance gives the film most of its tension. Thornton and Williams are fine, but not more.

Now, that’s the good. The bad is that the story is just so downright predictable and worn that every plot point can be seen coming a mile away. The thriller elements just aren’t thrilling when you know they’re gonna happen ten minutes in advance. The story itself is also clichéd and shallow. We’ve seen these bad guys in a hundred other movies, and we’ve seen this small town in a hundred more. The characters aren’t developed well enough, with the exception of Dale, that we have any investment at all in what happens to them. Even Dale, while he is more fully developed, comes across in such a way that we don’t care all that much about him, either.

The photography is adequate, giving some sense of the atmosphere of the town, but lacks a certain vibrancy. The score is spare, showing up every so often and sounding suspiciously like porn music in several spots. If it weren’t for all the swearing, the production values would have led me to believe that this had been made for TV. Not that made for TV is bad, but you do expect a bit more from a big screen feature.

Overall, director Carl Franklin ends up serving up a big plate of soggy, lame characters in an undercooked story (gotta love a good food metaphor – next time I’ll try and give you one). The plot is forgettable, as are the players. The performance of Bill Paxton and the dialogue aptitude of Thornton save One False Move from being terrible, but that is hardly high praise. It does, however, earn the movie an extra star. In the end, the movie is a violent, predictable story of cops and robbers. I recommend it only for very loyal fans of either Paxton or Thornton.