By George & Josh Bate
Paul Thomas Anderson is among a select few directors whose name alone generates attention. The acclaimed director burst on the scene with the cultural phenomenon that was Boogie Nights, followed by the sprawling drama Magnolia and the delightful Punch-Drunk Love. While There Will Be Blood and The Master, regarded by many as two of the 21st centuries’ greatest movies came after, more recent efforts Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza, squeezed between the excellent Phantom Thread, lacked the dramatic heft and charm of PTA’s earlier works. His next project, One Battle After Another, sees PTA return to form and at his most crowd-pleasing, absurdly funny, and timely.
One Battle After Another follows a revolutionary group known as the French 75, who employ destructive and even violent measures to combat the corruption and tyranny of imperial America. Years after his wife and key French 75 member Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) is apprehended by the unsettling Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), Leonardio DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson returns to action and re-teams with his fellow revolutionaries when he and Perifida’s daughter Willia (Chase Infiniti) becomes Lockjaw’s new target.
Seldom has there been a film over two and a half hours that flies by as propulsively as One Battle After Another. Every moment of the lengthy 162-minute runtime, incredibly without exception, captivates as PTA crafts a sweeping epic difficult to ever take your eyes off of. There’s a certain urgency to One Battle After Another not found in some of PTA’s other, more meandering efforts, namely Licorice Pizza and Inherent Vice. An operatic, energetic score from PTA’s frequent collaborator Jonny Greenwood occupies seemingly every scene of the film, much like how Martin Scorsese backed nearly every moment of The Departed with score or licensed music, which fosters a feeling that everything and everyone is in a rush or in close proximity to some immediate threat. In doing so, PTA creates an unexpectedly action-oriented film, filled with intricate action set-pieces and relentless pacing. With a purported budget fitting of a summer blockbuster, One Battle After Another achieves novelty in reshaping what one can expect from a big budget studio feature.
The urgency of PTA’s latest flows logically from the timely and high-stakes story. While One Battle After Another doesn’t go too radical or subversive with its messaging, the film clearly harbors relevance to a contemporary United States marred by violence, abuse of power, and corruption. The very first scenes sees members of the French 75 raid an immigration detention center and rescue imprisoned immigrants, an introduction that bears all too much of a resemblance to current controversies with ICE. DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson even watches The Battle of Algiers in his free time. There may not be too much depth to its subtext, other than holding up a mirror to modern America and showing what can happen when people become revolutionaries to fight the system, but it nonetheless hits home in rather poignant fashion.
Instigating the series of events that encompass the plot is Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw. Penn, who is arguably better here than he has ever been, crafts a deeply unnerving and toxically masculine antagonist, whose pursuit of Chase Infiniti’s Willa sets the story in motion. Penn makes an amazing antagonist with shades of all sorts of real-life insecure male figures in positions of power. The juxtaposition between his white supremacy and his fascination with Teyana Taylor’s black revolutionary creates a fascinating, contradictory make up for a villain, who steals every scene he’s in.
The bulk of the film sees DiCaprio’s Bob try to secure his daughter Willa’s safety as she is relentlessly pursued by Penn’s Lockjaw, driven by a truly twisted motive. The high-stakes established by an innocent teenager being hunted by a depraved lawman imbues One Battle After Another with incredible intensity and suspense that fits perfectly with the aforementioned urgency embedded in every scene. This is perhaps best demonstrated in a bulky middle act, which sees DiCaprio teaming up with Benicio del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos to escape a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants from Lockjaw and his invading troopers. These scenes make for frenetic, edge-of-your-seat viewing that even the best of action movies struggle to accomplish.
But the best action sequence is saved for last as PTA engineers a car chase that will go down as one of the best in cinematic history. It’s an innovative, gripping car chase that would make George Miller and William Friedkin proud and a scene destined to be rewatched on YouTube for years to come.
For all its action and intensity though, One Battle After Another embraces an absurd brand of humor. Leonardo DiCaprio is a phenomenal dramatic actor, but his performance here, coupled with turns in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Wolf of Wall Street, show that he may be an even better comedic actor. DiCaprio nails bumbling, dopey, panicked, intoxicated in crafting his performance as Bob Ferguson. There are certainly shades of Rick Dalton in the performance, given both Rick and Bob’s penchant for bad-decisions, stumbles, and anxiety, but Bob is a different character than anyone DiCaprio has played before. Despite his flaws and perhaps unlike Rick Dalton, Bob loves and cares deeply and, in many ways, is endearingly selfless. His love for his daughter and the enduring adoration for his daughter’s mother drives him right into the center of frenzied danger, which, coupled with just how funny DiCaprio is here, makes Bob such a likable protagonist to root for.
The humor doesn’t stop with DiCaprio as Penn’s conversations with a secret cabal of white supremacists and Benicio del Toro’s hilarious sensei figure generate plenty of laughs as well. At times, the humor threatens to undercut some of the drama, or at least make light of what is otherwise a serious situation, but, for the most part, PTA strikes a healthy balance between absurdist humor and high-stakes drama.
At its heart, One Battle After Another tells the story of a father and daughter whose relationship is shaped by the father’s past. Although most viewers won’t have the shady past of Bob Ferguson, there is something deeply relatable about having the mistakes of your past bleed into the lives of those you love the most. For much of its runtime and despite the focus on the father-daughter bond, however, PTA”s film feels a tad emotionally hollow, which in part may be due to just how absurd and funny the movie is. Fortunately, the film’s ending intelligently shelves the humor in favor of a moving, satisfying, and emotionally resonant resolution. One Battle After Another may not be the most heartfelt of movies, and yet its ending packs one hell of an emotional punch.
VERDICT: 8/10
One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson at his most crowd-pleasing, absurdly funny, and timely. The acclaimed filmmaker crafts a propulsive epic that never ceases to entertain, unfolding much like a fast-paced action comedy. The parallels to contemporary America may be a tad surface-level, but there is undoubtedly something powerful and disturbing that comes from PTA’s examination of abuse of power and corruption. DiCaprio is a great dramatic actor, but, as evidenced by this performance, he may very well be an even better comedic actor. Sean Penn has arguably never been better as he crafts a deeply unnerving and toxically masculine antagonist, while Chase Infiniti announces herself with a bang, delivering a performance that brings heart to the film. One Battle After Another is easily PTA’s best film since The Master and a demonstration that, even after 30 years of filmmaking, the acclaimed director still has new tricks up his sleeve.