Originally made in 1990 but inexplicably sat upon in the meantime, Carl Franklin's much impressive independent directorial debut (his apprenticeship served as actor in The A-Team) nominally shoots for genre, but takes great delight in twisting the traditional in to unfamiliar shapes.

Arriving with the unexpected topicality of so-called New Brutalism, the film opens with almost fifteen minutes of explicit violence as the vicious white Ray (co-scripter, Billy Bob Thornton) and his sadistic black ex-cellmate Pluto (Michael Beach) slaughter an entire family of drug dealers in Los Angeles, taking to the road with Fantasia (the startling Cynda Williams), Ray's black girlfriend. Convinced the perpetrators are heading for Star City, Arkansas, two cops (Earl Billings, Jim Metzler) rendezvous with naive hick-town sheriff Dale 'Hurricane' Dixon (Bill Paxton) as the film divides; part road movie, part noir thriller, part social document.

On the surface, One False Move plays it strictly to the rules and it's left to the careful layering of script elements to derive any dramatic tension from the piece. Throwing in the brutality of the first few minutes, Franklin effectively suffuses the whole with an air of menace and explosive tension, notably pursued through Beach's studious, ice-cold psychopath, wont to break in to bouts of extreme knife-wielding violence. But having established the motif, Franklin pushes the explicit to a back burner and the movie becomes effectively an elongated waiting game, constantly cutting from the wannabe Paxton's relationship with the big-city cops to a growing dishonour among thieves that borrows heavily from the bleak nihilist novels of the late, great crime writer Jim Thompson.

Against this backdrop (and one which doesn't make the all too common modern-noir mistake of out-staying its welcome, a la Hopper's The Hot Spot) time is found to sympathetically involve the audience in the divides - financial, racial, environmental - that affect and inform the motives of the characters without ever being signposted, being allowed to arise naturally from the muscular playing. Paxton and Williams stand-out from a creditable cast of largely second-league players. He, more often seen in commendable supports (a grunt in Cameron's Aliens, the spurred psycho-vampire in Bigelow's Near Dark) innocently dreams of moving to the city and hanging with the big boys ("Dale doesn't know any better," says his wife (Natalie Canerday), "he watches TV, I read non-fiction"), while Williams succeeds in being at once sassy but unsure. Both ring emotionally true to the inevitably bloody High Noon-ish climax that Franklin marshals with admirable speed and fury, the small and potentially ill-judged revelation that comes shortly before underlining the potency rather than over-egging the pudding.

One False Move isn't technically as noteworthy a debut as, say, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, but the strength of its script construction and resonance, and Franklin's assurity in handling atmosphere and coaxing top-flight performances from his cast are hardly any less impressive. A low-budget thriller that refuses to remain just that, and an outstanding debut.