ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: Fast, Ferocious and Funny

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (Blu-ray)

2025 / 162 min

Warner Bros

Review by Princess Pepper😸

Best movie of 2025? Yeah, right, I remember thinking not too long ago. Not if it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson film. 

Don’t get me wrong…Anderson’s a fine director. Even gifted in many respects. But while I acknowledge he’s made a lot of films worth seeing, I’ve personally never found them to be anything exemplary. Unlike, say, Scorsese or Tarantino, I’m not compelled to see a movie simply because he’s the director. Admittedly, though, I have not yet seen a few of them, including There Will Be Blood, which is widely considered a masterpiece, so you might wanna take my assessment of Anderson’s career with a grain of salt. Yeah, I know…shame on me.

However, One Battle After Another is unlike anything Anderson’s done before. A violent action thriller with healthy amounts of black comedy, it’s epic in scope and length. But despite running nearly three hours, it never feels that long because, in addition to assembling a superlative cast and writing great characters, Anderson demonstrates surprising skill at creating propulsive, tension-filled action sequences. 

Spiritually similar to Ari Aster’s Eddington - especially regarding some thematic elements - I don’t necessarily concur that this was the best of 2025, but yeah, it’s a masterpiece…certainly the most immersive and engaging Anderson film I’ve ever seen. At times, it’s also the funniest, almost as if the Coen Brothers snatched Anderson’s laptop and added their own darkly humorous touches to the story.

Speaking of which, I’m refraining from going into too much detail about the plot, partially because it’s something best seen than read, but also because it goes in unexpected directions that are best experienced cold. But in a nutshell, Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an explosives expert who falls in with a group of anti-fascist revolutionaries called French 75, led by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyanna Taylor), with whom he has an intense personal relationship…and a newborn child, Charlene. When Perfidia’s caught by police, she’s offered witness protection by gung-ho (and psychotic) military colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) in exchange for ratting out her friends. He’s also obsessed with Perfidia herself after a bizarre sexual encounter of their own.

Leo cosplays as a Walmart customer.

Fast forward 16 years…Pat is in hiding and goes by the name of Bob Ferguson, struggling to raise his teenage daughter, now Willa (impressive newcomer Chase Infiniti). He’s overly protective and extremely paranoid, exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse. Concurrently, Lockjaw is trying to join a secretive and powerful hate group, who give him carte blanche to hunt down immigrants by any means necessary. He’s also obsessed with tracking down Bob and Willa, the latter in particular, for reasons that are shocking and repellant enough to make Lockjaw one of the more memorable movie villains in recent memory….with Penn delivering a performance that’s both comical and unnerving.

In fact, all of the performances are topnotch. The older DiCaprio gets, the better he is at disappearing into characters, and along with his turn as Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, this ranks among his best roles. Elsewhere, Benicio del Toro is memorable as Sergio, who protects undocumented immigrants and saves Bob’s life (more than once), while Regina Hall is excellent as ex-French 75 member Deandra, assuming the task of hiding Willa as Lockjaw closes in. Interspersed throughout the story are intense, believable action scenes. The climactic car chase is particularly noteworthy, depicted with such creative simplicity that one wonders why nobody ever thought of doing it that way before.

I don’t know what I was expecting from Anderson, but it certainly wasn’t this, and I mean that in the best way possible. One Battle After Another is deserving of all the critical praise it’s getting and surely worth multiple Oscar nods (which it’ll likely get). The film didn’t suddenly convert me into PTA fan, but should he ever decide to tackle another action thriller, I’m totally onboard.