One Battle After Another Is A Bracingly Relevant Modern American Masterpiece
Leonardo DiCaprio has never been better than in Paul Thomas Anderson’s revolutionary thriller.
The term “masterpiece” gets bandied about a little too casually these days, but director Paul Thomas Anderson has no less than three in his filmography (the choice of which ones is obviously a source of furious debate amongst cinephiles). His latest feature, the darkly comic action thriller One Battle After Another, can confidently be counted as yet another.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a former member of a radical revolutionary group whose past violently comes back to haunt him, One Battle After Another is a sprawling and ambitious epic that Anderson — who wrote, produced, and directed the film — has been trying to make for decades. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel Vineland, which told a freewheeling saga about counterculture America from the ‘60s through the Reagan era, One Battle After Another is a bracingly relevant, breathlessly propulsive, and deeply layered thriller that manages to transcend its source material. On top of that, it’s entertaining as hell.
Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn are two of the film’s most captivating scene-stealers.
One Battle After Another opens, appropriately, with a bang. The radical revolutionary group the French 75 — including Dicaprio as Pat aka Bob, Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills, and Regina Hall as Deandra — is about to launch a heist on an immigrant detention camp, and they’ve got a foolproof plan to announce their debut: Sneaking in during the dead of night, they take the guarding soldiers hostage and shepherd the detained immigrants to their trucks waiting outside. Meanwhile, their ammunition’s expert, Pat, rigs an explosion that sets it all in motion. Leading them through the fray is the fierce Perfidia, who cruelly goads the camp’s commanding officer, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), before taking him hostage, kicking off a years-long rivalry (and becoming a source of obsession) with the zealous soldier.
The first act, which literally plays like a gangbuster, has Anderson breezily cycling through a montage of the French 75’s string of successful terror attacks — championing everything from free borders, to abortion and anti-capitalism — each one more triumphant and satisfying than the last. In the course of it, we learn that, even with Lockjaw hot on their heels, Perfidia strikes up an intense relationship with their hunter, despite being in a happy relationship with Pat. When she gives birth to a baby girl, Pat jumps at the chance for them to be a happy family, but Perfidia bristles at motherhood, resulting in her making a fatal mistake during their latest attack, leading the French 75 to dissolve and for Pat to go into hiding with their daughter.
Sixteen years later, Pat and his daughter, now going by Bob and Willa Ferguson, are living off the grid. But while Willa (Chase Infiniti) has grown into a spirited and clever teenager, Bob is a paranoid, greasy stoner dreaming of his revolutionary days. Unfortunately, those revolutionary days are back with a vengeance when Lockjaw, in a bid to join an exclusive white-supremacist secret order, decides to destroy what remains of the French 75 once and for all.
Leonardo DiCaprio is hysterical as Bob Ferguson, a washed up revolutionary.
It’s incredible how briskly paced and breathlessly exciting every moment of One Battle After Another is, despite its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Or maybe it’s because the film is so densely loaded that it moves with such ease. Anderson packs every minute and frame with awe-inspiring imagery and lovely little character moments that any shorter runtime would’ve felt like we were robbed. Though One Battle After Another weaves a complicated and tangled tale, it’s got the pacing and momentum of the purest action blockbuster. We move from one nail-biting set-piece to another — each shot with the kind of assured, clear-eyed filmmaking of our greatest cinematic masters — and Anderson clearly relishes getting to put his spin on the blockbuster epic.
But what makes One Battle After Another so singular is that Anderson doesn’t sacrifice his own humanist touch, nor Pynchon’s particularly shaggy narratives, in favor of making a good action thriller. This is best embodied by DiCaprio’s Bob, who, like Joaquin Phoenix in Anderson’s first Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice, is in peak pathetic protagonist mode. Bob spends most of the movie stoned out of his mind and sporting a ratty bathrobe and greasy ponytail, stumbling and embarrassing himself in front of his daughter. It’s easily DiCaprio’s funniest performance in decades — with the actor doing more pratfalls than he’s ever done in his career — but it’s also deeply rich and emotional. The first act, in which we see Pat as a young, passionate revolutionary fighting for the cause alongside the woman he loves, gives us the first glimpse we’ve seen of DiCaprio’s heartthrob charms in years, since he pivoted to playing cinematic monsters in pursuit of that elusive Oscar. And even as a washed-up revolutionary, Bob is a protective and loving father, who constantly grapples with how he failed his daughter. It’s a sweet, sensational performance from DiCaprio and a marker of Anderson’s remarkable tonal balancing act; the film rarely satisfies itself with being merely comedic, thrilling, or somber — oftentimes, it’s all three.
Benicio del Toro gives a slick, and sneakily hilarious, performance as Bob’s unlikely ally Sergio.
A terrific ensemble is par for the course for a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so it’s no surprise that every actor is firing on all cylinders in One Battle After Another. Sean Penn is disgustingly good as the villain of the piece, a suppressed, violent thug who walks like he’s a toy soldier who just came to life. Lockjaw provides both a sinister force and moments of comedic levity, with his obsession and fetishization of Perfidia, painting him as a sort of Claude Frollo-type. Though Taylor only appears briefly as Perfidia, she is a force of nature, her thunderous presence casting a long shadow over the movie. And even though the members of the French 75 — including Alana Haim, Paul Grimstad, and Shayna McHayle — get no more than a few minutes of screentime (though Regina Hall casts a warm presence as the member who re-emerges to rescue Willa) — they all feel fully fleshed-out and urgently alive.
Benicio del Toro gives Penn a run for his money as the scene-stealer of the movie, playing the wry and ultra-cool Sergio St. Carlos, a martial arts instructor who doubles as a self-described “Harriet Tubman for Latinos,” and Bob’s closest ally when all hell breaks loose. But it’s Chase Infiniti who gives the star-making performance as an ordinary girl thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and who transforms herself into an action hero.
Willa encounters an old member of the revolutionary group.
Shot on 35 mm film with VistaVision cameras by Anderson’s Licorice Pizza collaborator Michael Bauman, One Battle After Another looks jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Every setpiece sings and every frame looks like a painting, with Anderson lovingly turning shabby, overlooked midwestern towns into towering Americana backdrops. It makes the film’s potent political themes — which are inarguable, especially when the action builds to a face-off with corrupt American military in a sanctuary city — feel all the more timeless.
With the current political climate more poisonous and fraught than ever, it turns out the 2025 movie release that best captures the feeling of living in today’s doomscrolling hellscape is a movie that Anderson has been trying to make for decades, based on a story set during another cultural tipping point. Today, and perhaps for decades more, One Battle After Another is the urgently relevant benchmark by which every “timely” movie should be measured.
