ONE FALSE MOVE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
ONE FALSE MOVE is a film directed by Carl Franklin, from a script by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson. It stars Cynda Williams, Bill Paxton, Michael Beach, and Bill Bob Thornton. Rated R, for violence, strong language.
ONE FALSE MOVE is a quirky and surprising thriller. It begins with a scene of horrifying brutality and violence. One thinks that he or she has seen this before and knows what is going to follow: vengeance, cops and druggies, mayhem and high-speed car chases. But even at the beginning one knows he or she is in for something different, if just because of the camerawork that makes one's skin creep. And then a sudden change of pace and place, with some comedy thrown in, and the disorientation is complete. This is not going to be a routine Hollywood formula film.
By the time the film comes to its conclusion, it has widened its aims and taken charge of a surprisingly broad territory. Racism, justice, abuses of all sorts, prejudices, the gap between rural and urban, all these are fresh as the last headline. The story is sharp as a crease, powerfully told, with plenty of twists and turns to keep anyone off balance.
The story, by the way, or at least the script, was co-written by one of the actors, Billy Bob Thornton, who plays a white-trash coke head who is barely under control at the best of times. He and his co-writer Tom Epperson provided a script full of taut writing, tight plotting, full of energy and discipline.
The other actors are equally up to the demands of the script as Thornton. Cynda William as Fantasia is the touch point, the pivot, of the story. It's her mysterious, ambiguous role in the story that provides the most interest. She is the worst of the worst, yet driven by the tenderest of emotions. She's elegant, beautiful, treacherous, passive, possessed by more demons that would seem possible to pack into her small frame.
Michael Beach is the third member of this particular menage. An ex-con with a genius IQ, a passing resemblance to Malcom X, and a taste for knifework. He's cold and focused and very scary.
The cops include Jim Metzler as Dud Cole and Earl Billings as John McFeely, two LAPD officers who find they have to work with the hickish Dale "Hurricane" Dixon, played by Bill Paxton. This is more Paxton's movie, more Dixon's story, than anyone else's, although the script tries to fool you into dismissing him as a swaggering rube. And he is due for some come-uppances, some course corrections for his life. At first he appears irritating, foolish, headstrong, childishly self-involved, mostly harmless even if thoughtlessly racist and casually abusive of his powers. His wife (Natalie Canerday) puts her quiet wisdom on display when she sums him up with: "Dale doesn't know any better -- he watches TV. I read nonfiction."
Paxton may play Hurricane a little too broadly at first, but in the latter parts of the film his characterization takes on depth, dimension, color, and complexity.
A word of praise should also go to the musical score by Peter Haycock and Derek Holt and to the photography of James L. Carter.
Finally, let me say something briefly about the director, Carl Franklin. He has managed to give us a portrait of life on both sides of the color line that is probably unique. He finds the contact point between human folly and inhuman crime. He lets one of the characters speak a line that rings loud since the LA riots: "Looking guilty is being guilty for black people." But he puts it in the mouth of Fantasia after she has fully joined in her companions crimes. He is a very assured director, and I await with pleasure his next film.
I high recommend ONE FALSE MOVE even at full price.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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