One False Move (1992)

Billy Bob Thornton plays a coked-out killer who, as that description would suggest, kills a bunch of people with his partner (Michael Beach) and his girlfriend (Cynda Williams) and steals their cocaine. The girlfriend is from a little town in Arkansas, where Bill Paxton plays the sheriff as an extremely goofy, yet gung-ho cracker.

The movie switches back and forth between Paxton and two L.A. cops hanging out in town, waiting to see if the killers show up, and the killers making their way cross-country. Surprisingly, the city cops get along pretty well with the country-boy sheriff, while the killer trio are all tension. Paxton's star-struck and trying to impress them, to his wife's increasing concern.

All the locals keep alluding to Paxton having "known" Williams' character before she left town, in ways that imply he has other reasons to want to handle this himself, beyond machismo. The movie tries to build that up throughout, so credit for that.

The killers aren't doing nearly as well. Beach has plans to sell the coke and return to Chicago, while Billy Bob seems to want to inhale it all himself. They argue and threaten each other, and when he's losing, Billy Bob takes it out on his girlfriend, who eventually reads the room and bails for her hometown and her son. The drug selling plans don't work anyway, and eventually everything converges.

I like that Beach plays Pluto as very calm and collected, as the guy who has an actual plan, but it doesn't work any better than any of Billy Bob's ideas do. You expect it from the latter, because he's a twitchy, coked-up nut who gets violent with little provocation. But Pluto's plan fails because he misreads the guys he wants to sell to, and because leaving behind a bunch of bodies was a stupid idea, no matter how quietly he killed them.

There's an extended stretch of essentially that, set to a harmonica. Shots jumping from one character to the next. These two guys in a car. Paxton peering out from behind curtains, waiting to see their car. The L.A. cops closing in, via their own lead. As attempts to build tension go, it's no patch of the build to the final gunfight in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Maybe I just found the harmonica too irritating and wanted it to stop.