The latest film to be promoted by film culture’s equity-enthralled gatekeepers is the race/crime thriller One False Move from 1992, re-released by Criterion and newly hailed as an intersectional “neonoir.” Both commendations are fraudulent, reflecting disingenuous identity politics and genre inaccuracy.

The grim, punishing tale of interracial drug dealers (Michael Beach as Pluto, Cynda Williams as Fantasia, and Billy Bob Thornton as Ray) returns the Los Angeles–based trio to their Arkansas hometown, Star City — the roots of their criminal pathology — where they clash with several black and white police, including Fantasia’s discontented babydaddy Dale Dixon (Bill Paxton). Everyone inevitably meets their reckoning.

One False Move is inconsequential crime-movie trash (the type of junk that Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert routinely elevated on their influential reviewer-shill TV program) except for one early sequence: An intimate house party among working-class Arkansas blacks becomes the site of a home invasion and massacre by the miscreant trio. It happens slowly, and the unknown actors convey human defenselessness — reminiscent of the Clutter family killing in Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood. The terrors of a Southern lynching are mixed with slasher-movie mindlessness.

Director Carl Franklin, a former actor, closely observed the group’s vulnerability, yet that sensitivity is now being misread in the fashionable terms of “trauma porn,” according to which black victimization arouses the memory of America’s historical racial failings.

In Criterion’s supplementary booklet, crime novelist William Boyle categorizes the film as part of the ’90s “burgeoning heyday of neonoir,” a nonsense term for Tarantino’s just-opened Pandora’s box. Boyle quotes Ebert: “It belongs on the very short list of great films about violent criminals.” More nonsense, like Ebert’s extolling of the crappy feminist serial-killer flick Monster. When Boyle describes Franklin’s “desire to portray the real emotion behind the crime,” he neglects to say “violence,” “death,” or “killing.” And whose emotion, the prey’s or the predator’s? Praising “brutality tempered with moments of grace” is just another way of applying pity to sadism and victimhood.

The revival of One False Move isn’t about excellence. It’s a result of the post-Obama guilt about black representation that preoccupies film-culture curators. (Repertory movie houses ignore the superb Next Day Air and Mr. 3000.) One False Move’s grisly, conscience-stricken horror about American race relations matches the relentless race hustling of the Biden administration’s equity agenda. Siskel and Ebert’s hype saved the low-budget independent movie from direct-to-video fate, so Boyle ranks Franklin as an auteur even though the sorrowful vision of race relations (the Pluto, Fantasia, Ray, and Dale ménage) resembles the same lurid racial wet dream that Thornton would sign on to in Monster’s Ball. No wonder this film’s black characters are named Fantasia and Pluto, after Disney cartoons.

Criterion’s release continues film culture’s endorsement of “equity,” lending One False Move a false sense of quality. It revives the “trauma porn” trend in the worst way. Boyle’s essay skips over Franklin’s most humanist films — Punk and Laurel Avenue — praises Thornton’s atrocious Sling Blade, and then overrates Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress as “masterful.” He neglects to mention Thornton’s Bad Santa and the true nature of his bawdy shtick.

Franklin defended his cinematic lynching sequence to The Wrap: “It was necessary for that scene to have the emotional impact that it had.” But One False Move stands outside common American experience. Its ugly murders are in sync with the condescension seen in Biden’s morbid patronization — his designated race-based national monuments (four so far, the last using Emmett Till’s murder to foreground America’s tragic past). In the history of ethnic thrillers, though, the film was surpassed by the ethnic complexity and tough realism of S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete and Carol Reed’s masterful Odd Man Out, from 1947 — an aestheticized vision and spiritual argument that turned a political subject (the Irish rebellion) into “the conflict in the hearts of a people,” per its epilogue.

One False Move was always a bad movie, and I still remember those disconcerting slaughter scenes, but I also remember its press screening where pundits from the New Yorker and New York magazine turned to one another and nodded approval. It all fits too comfortably into today’s racial exploitation and political degeneracy.

That sorrowful party-massacre perfectly executes the recent ideology of Afropessimism — the new philosophical stance by the aggrieved scholar-poet Frank B. Wilderson III, who professes to have lived through the hard knocks that Thornton only fantasizes about. In his 2020 book Afropessimism, Wilderson refutes “the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings.” In other words, liberation and escape are impossible. Wilderson’s publisher is more pragmatic than Boyle when its promotional copy insists there’s “no restorative solution to the hatred that abounds [in] the reality of our inherently racialized existence.” That’s how most cultural progressives think. With the timely revival-ratification of One False Move, film culture condemns America.