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Friday, 3 October 2025

Review: One Battle After Another

Just like its characters and the war they're fighting, writer / director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film (loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland) rarely slows down. Despite the title, it's a rare recent action movie that's all about the chase, not the battle: everyone is constantly running to or from conflicts that are over in seconds.

To balance this - there's only so much character and exposition you can get out while you're on the run, though this does better on that front than you might expect - One Battle After Another is a film where what you see is what you get. People are who they say they are, and if they're not then you see the change played out on the screen. The story is about what it's about, with subtext largely kept to the minimal-slash-accidental kind.

So while this is a film that hits hard in the current moment, it is at heart an entertainment. The priority here is to make a satisfying action thriller of the kind that changing priorities and special effects have largely rendered redundant, and in that it succeeds: this feels satisfyingly grounded and weighty throughout, despite the plot containing no hidden depths or startling insights.

As for that plot, in broad strokes: Fifteen or so years ago, terrorist-slash-revolutionary organisation The French 75 roamed the USA, freeing people from immigration camps, setting off bombs in corporate headquarters and robbing banks to pay for it all. Leader Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) combines revolutionary fervour and a straight-up sexual lust for destruction. Good news for her partner and explosive expert "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio); confusing news for military man, one-time captive and now sexually obsessed enemy Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn).

When circumstances required Perfidia to make a choice, she did; in the present Calhoun is Bob Ferguson, a burnt out stoner largely shambling around in a dressing gown who is raising their teen daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) as best he can. The world has moved on, what's past is past - until the now Colonel Lockjaw is offered a chance to join the secret white power organisation that runs America. The only thing that stands in his way is the possibility that Willa might be his daughter. 

Much running around follows as Lockjaw sends all the forces at his command into the Ferguson's home town in a massive crackdown that sends immigrants fleeing under the guidance of Willa's martial arts teacher Sensi Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) while her high school classmates are locked up and interrogated. Willa is in the wind thanks to her family's revolutionary contacts; Bob, who is somewhat past his prime, is left struggling to catch up.

The action, by current standards, is small scale: lots of running, a couple of car chases, a few people get shot. But Anderson wrings every drop of drama and excitement out of these scenes, keeping everything on the move and everybody - even comedy grotesque Lockjaw - firmly human. 

Jumping out of a moving car would be extremely dramatic if it was happening to you; this is a war where one side can bring the full force of the state to bear and the other just has the connections between people to sustain it. By keeping things at the personal level, Anderson makes it very clear whose side he's on.

It would probably help balance the scales a little if Bob could remember the password to contact his former comrades. This isn't quite a comedy but there's a lot of humour here. Killer nuns and ridiculous conspiracy chiefs get laughs, but most of the comedy comes in the form of the well-meaning Bob swinging between anger and a kind of baked exasperation at having to try to resurrect his old life in a world where everything but the bad guys seems to have changed.

It's north of two and a half hours but the whole thing just flies by. Some things might not change and some wars may never be won, but you're a lot harder to hit if you don't stop moving.

- Anthony Morris 

 

 

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