2025 | rated R | starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Tony Goldwyn, Regina Hall | directed by Paul Thomas Anderson | 2 hrs 41 mins | 3 1/2 out of 5 |
One Battle After Another is a fascinating chance to see what it looks like when one of the premiere filmmaking auteurs of our time gets inspired by real-world politics to make a crowd-pleasing genre movie. Paul Thomas Anderson has built a career on esoteric movies that you admire and get challenged by and spiral out of his own brain without being built from a Hollywood studio template. Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread and even his Adam Sandler drama Punch Drunk Love sought to be puzzles to be unraveled by the viewer more than to have them kick back and be entertained by. It’s interesting to watch Anderson navigate what is essentially a kidnapping/chase film with One Battle After Another, complete with a cartoonish mustache-twirling villain and a car chase finale, adding details that a filmmaker’s eye would see that a studio hire would not bother with.
Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) are a couple and self-identified revolutionaries for the domestic terrorist group, the French 75. When freeing detainees in a migrant camp, Perfidia crosses paths with commander Stephen Lockjaw (Sean Penn) that sparks a bitter, sprawling, feud for years to come. A feud that comes to a head years later when Lockjaw, vying for higher office, orchestrates the kidnapping of Pat’s daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), and Pat, now under the alias of Bob Ferguson and burned out on years of being stoned, races through a web of corruption to get her back.
It’s a lot of fun watching Anderson take the heist/kidnapping movie structure (in a way, like all heist movies, One Battle follows a structure set by Rififi), throw it up in the air and reinvent it to emphasize what he’s interested in. In this case, it’s the cause and effect consequences of each character dynamic. Pat and Perfidia’s relationship after she has her baby and still needs to get out there, whereas Pat is satisfied with family life. Perfidia’s entanglement and ultimate blackmailing by Lockjaw. Bob and Willa’s father/daughter dynamic – which for my taste is where the movie’s split structure hinders it. This should be a father/daughter movie, but the way Anderson splits the film in half with a time jump, and concentrates so much on the prelude in the first act, robs us of that dynamic – all that happened off camera – and the payoff when Willa, a character we barely know, suddenly becomes the protagonist in the 2nd half. It’s bold and rule-breaking from a filmmaking standpoint and hollow and unsatisfying from an emotional standpoint.
That time jump is what Anderson is offering that a studio film wouldn’t have the patience for. Where another movie would have started in the present and deliver the back story in flashbacks as Bob finally revealed the truth to his daughter when he was forced to – Anderson fleshes that backstory out for the film’s first hour. It takes us on a journey with these characters and their good and bad decisions (mostly bad) and how that shapes the future, instead of relegating it to a motive that moves a heist film to the next set piece. His set pieces are smashing too. Anderson’s movies have always hummed with a visceral buzz and he directs that into car chases that swing, spin and crunch in front of us with urgency. The shoot-outs are equally jarring and desperate.
The film’s weakest issues unfortunately runs through both halves, and that’s Lockjaw, both Sean Penn’s potrayal and Anderson’s writing of the characters. He’s a hissing, spitting villain that would be tying women to railroad tracks if he wasn’t part of the US Military. And you know neither Penn nor Anderson treat him less of a real character and more of a punching bag mouthpiece for their own political frustrations because he doesn’t just hate Perfidia, he’s sexually attracted to her too. This is a tell-tell sign of obnoxious, one-dimensional self-aggrandizing character writing – the villain can’t just hate the protagonist because he thinks they’re wrong or bad, it’s because they’re so attractive and so sexy that he just can’t fight those urges. Why are you so obsessed with me? It’s basically the same as how all the bullies in Glee turned out to be gay themselves. They’re just jealous of how awesome the protagonists are. Duh. It’s so stupid. And Sean Penn plays him like a frantic wide-eyed lunatic from beginning to end.
None of the characters are particularly likeable, which I’m generally fine with. I don’t need to like my heroes for them to be interesting. The French 75 are an obnoxious group of pseudo-intellectual burnouts from the hippie era who think they are saving the world in modern day America. The movie itself seems to be anachronistically trapped both in a 70s blacksploitation film (a character named Junglepussy robs a bank like she stepped out of a Rudy Ray Moore film and wants to sock it to Dick Nixon) and a hyper-contemporary 2025 Antifa power fantasy. Anderson casts this group in the best possible light. They’re violent when they need to be, but all actual riots are started by government agitators in disguise. They have principles that don’t waffle from day-to-day, unlike their real-world European black block counterparts who don’t like borders one day and build autonomous zones with makeshift borders the next.
DiCaprio makes this work in a big way, allowing Bob to both be dedicated to the cause, pull back when it’s gone too far, and lean into the comedy of a burned-out hippie who can’t remember the code words and is disgusted with the new generation of cushy cosplaying revolutionaries (the sequence where Bob struggles with a modern day member of the movement over the phone is hilarious). That the back half of the film is Bob bumbling running around in a bathrobe, channeling his inner Lebowski and taking one hit and physical comedy gag after another is DiCaprio putting aside vanity for character creation.
One Battle After Another roars into theaters on a groundswell of hype. It’s not “groundbreaking” and it’s not “the best movie of a generation”, but it is very good, it’s rich and doesn’t get dull even at its marathon length. I’m actually surprised how positive the word of mouth is on this given how much the third act of this movie pulls the rug out from under us and subverts expectations without replacing it with anything new. Yes, the third act of One Battle is different for the sake of different. It’s Game of Thrones season 8 and Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Glass Onion. It sets up both a hero and a villain and then never brings them together, allowing a new hero and a new villain to step in, take the movie from the leads and wrap up all the lose ends themselves. Both Bob and Lockjaw become an afterthought in their own film. One Battle After Another is fascinating and at times riveting, other times very funny. It’s also self-indulgent. Those that think this is the movie of a generation and feel “seen” by it are lunatics. Their cheers mean nothing, we’ve seen what else makes them cheer.