One Battle After Another review: Leonardo DiCaprio leads a propulsive, hilarious, and political thriller
One Battle After Another is sure to be one of the most critically heralded movies of the year. On paper, that might seem obvious. This film is written and directed by 11-time Academy Award nominee Paul Thomas Anderson, maker of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza. True to Anderson's form, it boasts a compelling ensemble cast that includes big names like Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, and Teyana Taylor, as well as incendiary new talent Chase Infiniti. And on some level, it's inspired by a dense novel, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. But don't let the wild praise make you think you know what to expect.
Ferocious, funny, and jam-packed with provocation, One Battle After Another is a film so explosive in its ideas and execution that I doubt any one review can encapsulate all it's got going on. So, allow me to use my review to stress this: Whatever you're anticipating from Anderson's latest, this movie is more.
Believe the hype: One Battle After Another is a banger.
One Battle After Another is a blistering ensemble effort.
One Battle After Another's posters and first trailer might have you thinking this movie is centered on DiCaprio's character. However, the thriller begins with a bang in the form of Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor), a radiant and robust revolutionary with rebel squad the French 75.
The first act follows Perfidia closely, as she and her team storm an immigrant detention facility to free its prisoners. From there, she gets involved with two very different men, in mood and politic. The first is Pat "Ghetto Pat" Calhoun (DiCaprio), a bomb-maker whose enthusiasm for the cause is as explosive as his handiwork. The other is Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Penn), a military man who is repulsed by Perfidia's principles but turned on by everything else about her.
This gnarly triangle of love, sex, and transgression plants a seed that leads to Perfidia getting pregnant, resulting in a daughter named Willa, who'll never know her mother. A pivotal act pitches Pat and the baby into hiding, with the help of fellow revolutionary Lady Champagne (a scorching Hall).
Act 2 picks up 14 years later, when Lockjaw is freshly motivated to recover the missing father-daughter duo. So, the bulk of the film becomes a fight for Willa (Infiniti). Lockjaw is chasing the teen down for his own nefarious means; Pat (who is living under the alias Bob) is desperate to save her from the fiend who took her mom away. But Willa is no damsel in distress. A Black American woman, educated to understand — at least in part — the mission of her parents, she's a warrior born and raised. In that, she becomes more of a protagonist than her dad, Pat.
Teyana Taylor is in the role she was born to play; Chase Infiniti is a star.
One Battle After Another takes a big risk by cutting Taylor out of the film at the end of the first act. This actress/singer/songwriter/choreographer is so dynamic onscreen that she commands not only these violence-loving white men, but also the audience's complete attention. Brandishing an automatic weapon and a big, round pregnant belly, she is a fearless force to be reckoned with. And once the plot veers away from Perfidia, we experience a hint of the loss her family feels. We share an ache for her to return and be complicated, powerful, and glorious in her wrath and principle.
Essentially, Taylor's character casts a long shadow over the film's second act. Yet, within Willa's intense coming-of-age arc, Infiniti grows beyond this shadow. At a glance, Willa begins as a pretty average American girl, dressed in a bouncy taffeta skirt, white tee, boots, and a leather jacket. She's stylish but not standout, and she shoulders a familiar Gen Z frustration with her father's "polite" confusion over they/them pronouns. Mostly though, she's annoyed that he's dedicated to live as a reclusive pothead, requiring her to be a grown-up before her time.
This father-daughter conflict blooms as military forces invade the school dance. In the blink of an eye, Willa must make the leap from average teen to on-the-run rebel, as the storming government forces have no mercy for this child. Infiniti's own eyes powerfully show the shock of this forced transition in close-up. As she's bounced from a van to a safe house — where the legacy of her mother is muddied — Willa struggles to grasp all the ways her world is being turned upside down, not because of any choice she made, but because of the war and the identities she was born into. And as the film barrels into its climax, Infiniti evolves this pathos into action with a jaw-dropping execution.
One Battle After Another is a rollercoaster of a thriller.
I kid you not, though this movie is nearly three hours long, I'd have believed you if you told me it's 90 minutes. While Anderson is known for a meaty runtime, he has rarely crafted so propulsive a plot line that the film just races by. This is all the more impressive considering the sprawl of characters, arcs, drama, comedy, and politics that come into the mix.
Without getting into spoilers, Anderson's execution of fight scenes offers a mix of slapstick and heart-wrenching relentlessness. Reflecting how violence works in so much of American media, it is used here both as comedic entertainment and gut-punching dramatic impact. Yet the most thrilling sequence is a car chase in the climax that puts us in the seats of both the pursued and the pursuing. The result is truly that of a rollercoaster, making this critic's stomach flip. But unlike a theme park attraction, there's no promise of how this ride may end. So as our vision is taken up by another hill ahead, with no idea what comes with the fall to follow, a mounting fear sets in, which Anderson pays off masterfully.
While Anderson is known for a meaty runtime, he has rarely crafted so propulsive a plot line that the film just races by.
Beyond the action, Willa and the other Black revolutionary women of the film ground One Battle After Another's drama. Denied the privileges of the white men who are their allies or foes, their stakes in this rivalry are more starkly captured. It's beyond pride. Their bodies, regarded as political, are the frontline of their war. By contrast, the white men who are rivals here are portrayed as clowns.
Sean Penn is funny and terrifying; Leonardo DiCaprio is a terrific clown in One Battle After Another.
Col. Lockjaw is a man of ruthless ambition. Specifically, he aspires to be in the secret society of white nationalists called the Christmas Adventurers. Loosely inspired by Vineland, One Battle After Another veers more closely to the tradition of media like The Adventures of Superman's "The Clan of the Fiery Cross" and the Coen Bros' O Brother, Where Art Thou? in terms of making a mockery of such dangerous and demented white power groups as the KKK. Surrounded by preppy, rich, and powerful white men, Lockjaw has conversations that are equal parts repellent and hilarious for their sheer outrageousness, like the earnest use of the phrase "semen demon."
In this realm, Lockjaw is an admired tough guy, and Penn pursues that vision by bulking up like an action figure and carrying himself in a stiff physicality that suggests not so much discipline as crippling repression. Forced into a box of his own making, Lockjaw is vicious, vengeful, and violent, but also a laughable fool, and the remnants of the French 75 will let him know it.
DiCaprio as Pat (or Bob) is Lockjaw's foil though he, too, is a buffoon. As teased in the film's trailers, years in hiding have been spent getting stoned. So when called upon to recall access codes from 14 years before, he is absolutely at a loss. Scrambling for help, Pat races to Willa's martial arts instructor Sergio St. Carlos (a sublimely stoic yet serenely funny Benicio del Toro). Together, they make a dazzling comedy duo of the Goofus and Gallant variety.
Fans of The Wolf of Wall Street will giddily recall DiCaprio's physical comedy from the quaaludes sequence as he fumbles and bumbles trying to get to the extraction point to reunite with his daughter. Yet these scenes are not just comic relief that masterfully balance the chest-gripping tension of Willa's thread of escape. Considering Anderson's own life, there's a self-reflective vulnerability here.
With his partner Maya Rudolph, he has four children, making him a white father to Black daughters. So, it's easy to imagine that in Pat, as with Daniel Day-Lewis's Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread, there's a personal inspiration point, where the filmmaker is grappling with balance between self and family. Where in Phantom Thread it's one of work and home life, specifically quality time with his wife, One Battle After Another explores the fear of being too self-involved or out-of-touch to be the father a Black daughter needs in a space where her very existence is deemed political by those in power.
All of this to say, One Battle After Another delivers on the trailers' promise to be a wildly funny thrill ride, rich in star power. But true to Anderson's signature, it's also probing depths both political and personal, raw and ruthless. Alongside Sinners, it will undoubtedly be declared one of the best films of the year, not only for what it brings to cinema in terms of spectacle and spirit, but also what it has to say about America today.
