Director – Paul Thomas Anderson – 2025 – US – Cert. 12A – 161m
*****
Over a decade after they disappeared into a safe town with new identities, a father and now-teenage daughter are tracked down by their army officer nemesis… – one of the most extraordinary Warner Bros. action movies you’ve ever seen is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 26th
Radical, black revolutionary Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor) is on the verge of leading the forces of underground far-left organisation the French 75 in an attack on a Californian immigration centre to free those imprisoned when a bedraggled man pulling a trailer, looking to all intents and purposes like a refugee, turns up. Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) tells Perfidia he has all the explosives she could possibly need, and sets about using them with her blessing, putting on an impressive show of pyrotechnics to prove his credentials. Inside the centre, Perfidia locates its commanding officer Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) to sexually humiliate him at gunpoint. Surprisingly, this personal violation only serves to turn the white soldier on.
With Pat and the pregnant Perfidia now a couple, she carries on her high octane, physically demanding revolutionary activities, belly fully swollen, as if there were no child. When Charlene is born, Perfidia seems to have little interest in the responsibilities of motherhood, leaving Bob to raise the child. Then a French 75 bank robbery goes wrong, and she is captured by Lockjaw and put into the witness protection programme in exchange for French 75 names. Pat and Charlene assume the new identities of Bob and Willa Ferguson and move to the safe city of Baktan Cross. Some time later, Perfidia absconds from her WPP location.
By the time she is a teenager, Bob has schooled Willa (Chase Infiniti) in the ways and protocols of the French 75. For instance, both of them carry a device which, if ever they come within a certain distance of another wearer, will alert them: they are then to follow all instructions given them by the other wearer as a matter of life and death. Unlike everyone in her high school peer group, Willa is banned by her father from owning a mobile phone (as it would make her easily trackable by the authorities). And she has been told her mother was killed by Lockjaw as a revolutionary war hero. To the girl, who apart from her dad’s strange ideas is leading the ordinary life of a US high school student, it all seems a bit farfetched.
And then all hell breaks loose as Lockjaw stumbles on the Baktan Cross location of Bob and Willa and, believing her to be his child, orchestrates a series of immigration raids in the town as a cover for capturing father and daughter. Willa is taking a loo break at a high school concert when she is contacted and rescued by French 75 operative Deandra (Regina Hall) before the gig is raided, who takes her to a convent run by the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, a radical order of weed-growing nuns. This would be a safe haven, but for the fact that Willa conceals significant information from Deandra…
Bob is less lucky: years of substance abuse during his quiet Baktan Cross years have addled his brain. When he gets to a payphone and goes through his half of the complex, pre-written question and answer session designed to protect the French 75, he can’t remember the answer to the line, “What time is it?” Even though, his and his daughter’s life may depend on this. Instead, he seeks help from Willa’s karate sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) who runs an immigrant escape route. Following designated men of Sergio’s across rooftops, Bob fails to keep up and is captured by Lockjaw’s forces…
Lockjaw, meanwhile, is thrilled to have been invited to join right-wing, White Christian Suprematist group the Christmas Adventurers, who when they discover that he has been involved in an interracial relationship which may have produced a child, send member Tim (Tony Goldwyn) to assassinate him…
None of which gives any indication of the frenetic pace of the proceedings, set in the opening scenes by Perfidia’s ability to run with all the strength, speed and grace of an Olympian, and a combination of judicious scriptwriting and / or editing which means that any scene which might slow the plot without good reason (there are plenty which focus on character or dramatic conflict) is suitably pruned or excised. Despite what its near two and a half hour running length might suggest, there’s no fat here; the film is lean, muscular and potent. To paraphrase the title: one extraordinary set piece after another. Anderson has shown himself to be adept at this before, notably in Magnolia (1999); but, whatever else that film is, it’s not an action movie. Whereas, as its title indicates, One Battle After Another most definitely is.
Surprisingly, it’s the writer-director’s second Thomas Pynchon adaptation (after his less than satisfying Inherent Vice, 2014), a free interpretation of Vineland (1990), set in 1984 during the Reaganite years and with much material about the characters’ hippie backgrounds in the 1960s. Anderson is no stranger to period films – see, for instance, The Phantom Thread (2017), yet he chose to set One Battle After Another in the present day, although even the opening sequences which must take place around thirty years before, feel contemporary.
In scene after scene, you feel you’re watching cinematic greatness. It’s a film which constantly surprises. One of its crowning achievements, towards the end, is a car chase: remarkable because, although there have been countless car chases, you’ve never seen one quite like this. It’s set on a section of rolling road in a US desert, the camera capturing perfectly the phenomenon that, as you drive toward the next ridge, whatever is hidden below the horizon is a complete unknown – which leads to a few surprises for the characters involved. Fans of old jazz standards will be delighted when Lockjaw suddenly walks into view to the tune of Perfidia.
It also delivers one of the most succinct summations of US White Christian Nationalism – a very different thing from Jesus-grounded Christianity – this writer has ever seen.
And it frequently plays like a comedy of errors, as for instance with DiCaprio’s drug-addled ex-radical failing to remember all the code line he needs to get him the help he requires. DiCaprio is at the top of his game, while the supporting cast who include seasoned veterans like Sean Penn, Tony Goldwyn and Benicio Del Toro, and newcomers like Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, are similarly excellent, with Penn’s performance in particular a career best.
One Battle After Another feels like a Paul Thomas Anderson film, yet it unexpectedly also feels like the archetypal Warner Bros. tough guy action movie. More than any Warner Bros. Film I can think of, actually… More than Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987). More than Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). More than The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999). More than Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015). Unexpectedly because that’s not in the slightest what his previous films indicate that Anderson does. And it is stunning on so many levels. It is not a film to take in on one viewing: you’ll want to go back and see it again and again, and each time, you’ll get a lot more out of it. Without sacrificing what he does well, Anderson has widened his reputation to include action movie writer-director. A multiple viewings must-see.
One Battle After Another is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 26th.
Trailer: