One Battle After Another Misfires in Cheap Tarantino Mode

One Battle After Another

★ ★

One Battle After Another is the latest from director Paul Thomas Anderson about a paranoid, has-been revolutionary trying to raise a daughter and keep her safe while living off-the-grid. Anderson has built a career on offbeat topics, crafting compelling stories out of the unlikely. Here, he swaps deep emotional connections for what feels like his version of revolution.

The story itself is convoluted, and at times, confusing. That’s not great for a film that wears out its welcome just 20 minutes into a nearly three-hour runtime.

The film opens on a U.S.–Mexico border detention center where Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) joins up with other “revolutionaries” in her group, The French 75. With her is her boyfriend Pat “Ghetto” Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), Deandra (Regina Hall), Mae West (Alana Haim), Laredo (Wood Harris) and Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle). They break into a detention center to free the detainees.

Sean Penn as Colonel Lockjaw and Teyana Taylor as Perfidia
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

While Perfida’s crew is at work, she comes across the tent of Captain Lockjaw (Sean Penn). There’s an odd sexual tension between them—Lockjaw seems to be both attracted to her and hate her presence at the same time. Sensing this, she holds him at gunpoint, has him bind himself with zip ties and forces him to humiliate himself before parading him outside to face his soldiers.

It’s a moment that undercuts Lockjaw’s menace for the rest of the film. He might be seething in anger, but emasculating him this early makes it hard to take him seriously as a menacing threat.

Teyana Taylor as Perfidia
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

Next, the French 75 rob a bank—proving themselves more domestic terrorists than sympathetic revolutionaries. Lockjaw catches Perfidia as she’s planting a bomb in a ladies’ bathroom. He tells her he’ll let her carry on if she meets him at a hotel later. She agrees, plants the bomb, and has sex with him at a seedy motel.

Nine months later, she gives birth to a daughter named Charlene. Motherhood isn’t in Perfidia’s life goals so she leaves Pat to raise Charlene on his own. She must carry on The French 75, the rest be damned.

Sixteen years later, while living in hiding to avoid authorities, Pat is now Bob and Charlene is now Willa (Chase Infiniti). In his own paranoid way, Bob does everything he can to keep Willa safe. He’s not yet aware Lockjaw isn’t far from disrupting their peace.

Chase Infiniti as Willa
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

There’s so much going on in the script, the narrative falls apart and becomes more of a disjointed assembly of well-shot, highly choreographed action scenes. Despite capable acting, we get fractured segments of emotional connection between characters. Stylistically, it tries too hard to be profound, coming off more like knockoff Tarantino you’d find on the convenience store DVD rack.

The film insists on framing Pat/Bob as a folk hero, but his actions—bombings, robberies and endangering civilians—read less like revolution and more like domestic terrorism. The refusal to acknowledge this, or hold its characters accountable, strips the story of heroism—leaving us no one viable to root for. At a time when political violence is not hypothetical but present-tense, the movie feels recklessly divisive. Rather than provoking thought, it seems intent on stoking division.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob/Pat
© 2025 Warner Bros. Pictures

Buried inside One Battle After Another is the kernel of a far stronger story: not the glossy aggrandizement of bombings and robberies, but a stripped-down character study of a man on the run, raising a daughter he loves more than life itself as the sins of his past close in. That’s the movie that might have earned a full battery of stars. Instead, what we’re left with is a tone-deaf lecture disguised as a revolution.

I gave this film two stars instead of one, because of a brilliantly staged car chase. It involved an inspired cinematic use of depth-of-field and rolling hills within which is a glimpse of real humanity—a father hell-bent on saving his daughter. But when the major highlight of a nearly three-hour epic is a car scene, there’s something fatally wrong under the hood.