One Battle After Another Review: A Bold, Electrifying Political Thriller

Leonardo DiCaprio leads Paul Thomas Anderson’s fleet-footed state-of-the-nation epic, where grenade-tossing, car-flipping action is counterbalanced by dark, satirical humour, writes Yasmin Omar. 

There comes a point in every frustrated activist’s life when they must make The Decision. Will they continue to agitate through legitimate channels (voting, marching, lobbying), or stick it to our abortion-criminalising, climate-denying, technofascist overlords by sowing anarchy? In Paul Thomas Anderson’s explosive political thriller One Battle After Another, the leftist vigilante group the French 75 put down their ballots and pick up their bombs, waging a revolution to take back control of their country. A film that opens at an immigration detention centre on the US-Mexico border obviously has something to say about How Things Are Right Now. Look beyond the weed-growing nuns and white-supremacist cultists, though, and you’ll find a humbler, more personal story: a father desperately searching for his kidnapped daughter. 

Unlike the most prominent fathers in Anderson’s oeuvre – Jason Robards’ dying patriarch in Magnolia (1999), Daniel Day-Lewis’ cutthroat oil tycoon in There Will be Blood (2007) – freedom fighter Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) neither abuses nor abandons his child. On the contrary, he renounces his revolutionary responsibilities when baby Charlene is born, which infuriates his partner in love and crime, Perfidia Beverly Hills (a commanding Teyana Taylor), who won’t be slowed down by family commitments. To Perfidia, breast-pumping and nappy-changing prove an inadequate substitute for the couple’s former, danger-heightened life, when days were spent holding policemen at machine gunpoint and having sex in a field mere metres from an active bomb (her idea, to which Pat nervously agrees). 

She continues French 75 activities until she’s arrested, forcing Pat and Charlene to skip town, and take on new identities as Bob and Willa Ferguson. Sixteen years later, Bob’s law-breaking past catches up with him when Willa (Chase Infiniti) is abducted by Sean Penn’s self-hating, anti-Black cop Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (sic), who’s seeking admission into the white-nationalist brotherhood the Christmas Adventurers’ Club. For a tessellating ensemble piece crammed with plot and characters – the supporting cast includes Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall and Alana Haim – One Battle is remarkably light on its feet. It’s a spry chase movie where our players, harried and breathless from racing after each other, are divided along marker-pen-thick ideological lines. Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurers are motivated by hate; Bob is motivated by love. 

Anderson, who quite rightly weathered criticism for anti-Asian racism in his previous film Licorice Pizza (2021), is much clearer about who his targets are here. One Battle manages to paint its villains as both ridiculous and menacing: the former never defanging the latter. Take Lockjaw. His ludicrous name, like his colleague special agent Toejam, immediately establishes the writer-director’s ACAB agenda. The way Lockjaw carries himself is also amusing. His preposterous walk, with its stiff, unnatural stance straining for macho dominance, needs to be seen to be believed.

But he’s terrifying whenever his hate-hardened face twitches ever so slightly, a forewarning of the vitriol preparing to spew out. The character’s calmness, too, is unsettling. Anyone who dispassionately smashes open a door with a battering ram is desensitised to violence – and more than willing to inflict it. Likewise, the jolly festive music that announces the arrival of the Christmas Adventurers doesn’t diminish their sinister, eugenics-peddling beliefs. (In a canny piece of casting, Tony Goldwyn, best known as the Republican President secretly sleeping with Kerry Washington’s African American crisis manager in Scandal, heads up the group.) 

DiCaprio, who portrayed an equivalent sectarian murderer just two years ago in Killers of the Flower Moon, shoulders the bulk of One Battle’s considerable comedy. The actor has recently been on a tear playing losers and hasbeens, from the bespectacled nerd gushing over his Star Wars memorabilia in Don’t Look Up (2021) to the washed-up TV cowboy slurping frozen margaritas from a blender in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

There’s more than a touch of Hollywood’s Rick Dalton in the careworn, bong-smoking slacker Bob, who can most often be found binge-drinking in a tattered bathrobe and lightly scolding the youth (Gen Z standing in as today’s ‘goddamn fucking hippies’). DiCaprio gamely positions his character as the butt of intergenerational humour, unable to take a selfie without assistance and bewildered by a revolutionary kid’s conflict-deescalting therapyspeak. It’s very funny. As in Don’t Look Up and Hollywood, the actor locates his best punchlines at the intersection of pity and anger. When Willa’s friends collect her for a school dance, for example, his pandering ‘What’s up, homie?’ (pity) sours into hissing threats towards a boy he suspects she’s dating (anger).    

Bob is not exactly your typical action hero, precision-tooled to the point of inhumanity. His physical feats to rescue his daughter are defined by their inelegance, if not outright failure. They’re played for laughs, but it’s also strangely moving to see him push his body to its limits for Willa. You can’t help wincing at his ungainly lumbering across rooftops and horrible, hacking cough after a tear-gas attack. One Battle is certainly a state-of-the-nation treatise – with strong opinions on the shortcomings of the criminal-justice system and the forgotten promises of Obama-era post-racism – and yet it is, in many respects, about ageing. 

Bob has reached midlife and is coming to terms with the sad reality that the world has moved on without him. The film’s mocking of its clueless Gen Xer, amusing as it is, conceals a longing for the past. Not, to clarify, in any MAGA sense: Bob, like so many PTA characters before him, is yearning to mend his broken family.

There’s a marked maturity to Anderson’s depiction of the film’s central parent-child relationship. The writer-director, himself the father to three Black daughters (and a son), is softer on Bob than any of his previous paterfamilias, presenting him as flawed but well-intentioned. DiCaprio and Infiniti have a believable, lived-in dynamic, their characters’ sniping frustrations a mere front for their deep-seated affection. It’s an impressive film debut for Infiniti, who carries the weight of a kid who’s had to grow up ahead of time, and shows real grit during the spectacular final-act showdown. 

One Battle After Another is a full meal of a film, a character piece smuggled into a roof-jumping, grenade-tossing, car-flipping action movie that smartly comments on third-rail political issues. If this is what the revolution looks like, let it be televised.  

WATCH ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER IN CINEMAS