‘One Battle After Another’ review: Leonardo DiCaprio powers Paul Thomas Anderson’s gripping thriller

Dir/scr: Paul Thomas Anderson. US. 2025. 162mins 

Author-director Paul Thomas Anderson units his excessive characters on a collision course in One Battle After One other, a violent showdown between warring ideologies that ensnares two generations. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a former revolutionary gone tender who should defend his daughter from a vindictive navy man decided to destroy them. This audacious action-thriller is the filmmaker’s most purely entertaining automobile, however beneath its adrenalised set items are quieter issues about how greatest to make lasting change in a corrupt world.

Anderson creates an electrical setting

Opening within the UK and US on September 26, One Battle carries a hefty price ticket and represents one thing of a industrial danger for Warner Bros contemplating the image just isn’t based mostly on current mental property (although it’s loosely impressed by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland). Nonetheless, DiCaprio stays an enormous box-office draw, and Anderson’s arthouse cachet ought to appeal to discriminating viewers. The action-packed drama additionally appears prone to profit from robust opinions and main awards buzz. 

DiCaprio performs Bob who, because the movie begins, is a part of The French 75, a militant revolutionary group devoted to overthrowing the US authorities. Throughout a profitable raid on a detention centre, Bob’s lover and literal accomplice in crime, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), mocks the manhood of commanding officer Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), an exaggeratedly macho right-wing colonel. Livid at being humiliated, Lockjaw makes it his mission to carry the group to justice — particularly Perfidia, who turns into pregnant with Bob’s little one. 

Roughly 16 years and several other key plot twists later, One Battle shifts the setting to a sleepy small city the place Bob now resides together with his teen daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), each of them laying low to keep away from the authorities. However Lockjaw has misplaced none of his fervour to seek out them. 

Anderson crafted visually arresting set items in There Will Be Blood and riveting motion sequences for Inherent Vice, however One Battle’s a number of automotive chases and shootouts show extra muscular and thrilling. Backed by frequent collaborator Jonny Greenwood’s tense rating, the filmmaker creates an electrical setting as these younger revolutionaries stage daring financial institution robberies and random bombings. Anderson invitations the viewers to be seduced by their anarchic spirit as Bob and Perfidia passionately make love when they aren’t attacking the pillars of what they understand to be a fascist energy construction (we meet white-supremacy cabals and merciless anti-immigrant activity forces over the course of the image). The camerawork ripples with vitality, and editor Andy Jurgensen retains the story hurtling ahead at a dizzying clip.

However as soon as One Battle jumps ahead in time, the tempo readjusts, discovering Bob now stoned and paranoid, his once-fiery rhetoric changed with a burnout jitteriness as he wastes away on the sofa. Willa has one million questions in regards to the mom she by no means knew, however her father’s obscure solutions solely drive extra of a wedge between them. Nonetheless, he has good motive to insist that they continue to be on excessive alert — as soon as Lockjaw reappears, the cat-and-mouse video games start anew.  

DiCaprio continues an enchanting latest pattern – begun with As soon as Upon A Time In Hollywood and Killers Of The Flower Moon – of taking part in basically weak males who mistakenly imagine they’ve greatness in them. Bob begins off as a wild-eyed insurgent, however Perfidia’s household (who’ve an extended historical past with America’s revolutionary motion) sense he lacks the mettle to again up his posturing. One Battle helps their suspicion, and Bob should ultimately dig deep inside himself to find the hero he has at all times pretended to be.

The efficiency is partly comedian, even pathetic, though the humour doesn’t at all times land. (Bob’s encounters with Benicio Del Toro’s quirky sensei are a tad too broad). However the character’s lost-and-refound idealism results in some terrific third-act motion scenes, whereas hinting on the ways in which youthful activism can curdle in maturity leading to cynicism and bitterness.

The supporting forged excels at portraying these pungent personalities. Penn’s monstrous Lockjaw emerges as a racist, sexy creep whose private grudge towards Perfidia takes on demented, virtually demonic proportions. Taylor is sort of a stick of dynamite as Perfidia, her sexual urge for food equal to her starvation for revolution. Bob could wish to be a pacesetter however Perfidia is the actual deal, and Taylor’s magnetic, unpredictable flip builds on the promise of her exceptional work in 2023’s A Thousand And One.

As for newcomer Infiniti, she turns into an important factor in One Battle’s second half. Willa could not bear in mind Perfidia, however Infiniti suggests how alike mom and daughter are, two generations joined in an ongoing struggle for a greater tomorrow that Anderson celebrates whereas chronicling the toll it takes on those that wage that struggle.