One Battle After Another review: a truly killer action thriller

Headlines, social media and living rooms the world over are dusted with the fall-out from intergenerational warfare. Of millennials-on-down rightly cracking the shits at crankily entitled boomers, while Gen Xers sigh resignedly in the middle. A sprawling brawl that’s at the core of One Battle After Another.

The latest from Boogie Nights and Phantom Thread writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, the film’s inspired by, rather than closely adapting, Thomas Pynchon’s decades-spanning 1990 novel, Vineland. It marks Anderson’s second dalliance with the mystery-shrouded author’s oeuvre, after 2014’s under-loved (but I think great) Joaquin Phoenix-led-Inherent Vice.

Killers of the Flower Moon star Leonardo DiCaprio is Bob, a schlubby, dressing gown-sporting, weed-huffing dude who reads like a deadbeat dad, but is actually the tender if overbearing father who stuck around for Willa (outstanding emerging actor Chase Infiniti),

Of course, his well-meaning concern, but slowness to grasp the rapid evolution of language, is a snapback-provoking red flag to his eye-rolling, corner-holding, biker jacket and Docs-wearing daughter, who nonetheless loves her frustratingly doofus dad.

Their cross-generational sniping includes a cute kitchen scene in which Willa moans about their unusual living arrangements (more on that in a mo). ‘I didn’t ask for this, it’s just how the cards were rolled out for me,”’only for Bob to pedantically point out you roll dice, not cards.

Then, when he’s startled by the unannounced arrival of Willa’s mates, picking her up to go to the school dance, and he fumbles over pronouns, she whips, ‘It’s they/them dad. It’s not that hard’.

One Battle After Another: no sitcom

As funny as Anderson’s magnificently audacious One Battle After Another is, this this is no sitcom. Instead, it’s one of the most propulsively engaging, politically fired-up action thrillers you’ll see all year.

Pynchon’s source material was set under the lash of Reagan’s neoliberal slash and burn, with the father-daughter set-tos focused on his free loving 60s radical vibes and the reality of where that got them. One Battle After Another shifts to now-ish, and the clusterfuck spun out of 9/11 and the ruins of the World Trade Centre.

Bob and Willa live deep in a dark forest out the back of beyond because of his life choices. He was led by his whatsit into joining bad-arse revolutionary Perfidia (multihyphenate star Teyana Taylor) in anarchy-raining resistance movement, French 75.

The film opens with their assault on a government detention centre near the Mexican border, then cracks through multiple strikes on state violence at an alarming rate until a bank job gone wrong breaks up the gang.

By then, Perfidia – the Spanish word for betrayal – and Bob’s hands-all-over-one-another horn, amidst iterally one battle after another, has fizzled out. But not before leading, directly or indirectly, to Willa. Flash-forward to her as a feisty teenager who believes her mum to be dead, and Willa resents this perceived abandonment that placed more importance on the fight than her.

Willa isn’t technically allowed a mobile phone. But her typical teenage rebellion on this front, turbocharged by her mother’s absence, kicks us into another cycle of the film’s marvellously unhinged and impeccably staged mayhem.

You see, the cowlick-crowned Colonel Steven Lockjaw (an off-the-charts Sean Penn) is on a mission to locate her. He, too, was once blindsided by Perfidia’s feminist fury, in too tight to hide his excitement uniform. Clearly enjoying being sub to her dom, their entanglement muddies the waters of his militarily campaign. One overseen by a secretive Klansmen-like cabal of white supremacists who hilariously hail one other with Christmas epithets and are pernickety about process.

Penn’s insidiously prowling, lustful tongue-flicking marks him out as the best bad-haircut preening brute since Javier Bardem’s in No Country for Old Men, with the hapless rivalry between him and Bob erupting in the film’s back end  as Anderson’s muscular bruiser cracks wide fissuring fault lines.

One Battle After Another: well-drawn characters

While this could easily have been a standard Hollywood sausagefest, Anderson is a nuanced writer who relishes the unsaid business between his deftly drawn characters, all immaculately garbed by supreme costume designer Colleen Atwood.

‘You know you are so unsuitable for my daughter,’ Pefidia’s steely mother, played by an incandescent Starletta DuPois, withers Bob’s way, not long after Willa is born. ‘My child comes from a whole line of revolutionaries, and you look so lost.’

And he is. Bob is man incapable of keeping up with our increasingly dark times, having given it all up for a quietly ensconced life of stoner blue-hued peace, mourning what he once had. Like a dog with a bone, Lockjaw won’t let go, valorising Pefidia’s choice to walk the path of violence and extracting from that obsession the creepily entitled patriarchal need to claim Willa as his own.

One Battle After Another: DiCaprio as a loser

Di Caprio’s amiably pratfalling loser is repeatedly framed as pathetic with pathos, especially while on the run. Unable to recall a secret password, he’s incensed by a prissy resistance call centre guy who snips, ‘Maybe you should have studied the rebellion text a little harder,’ which is flat out funniest line of the film’s many zingers and attending sight gags.

An acerbic wit aided by Benicio Del Toro’s zen dojo owner Sergio, the top-notch straight man in this comic duo, who’snot above gleefully espousing ridiculous(ly good) lines like, ‘You know what freedom is? No fear, just like Tom Cruise’.

There’s even sympathy for the devil that is Penn’s odious troll, in one of his finest hours, including another awesome odd couple pairing when Willa finally comes face-to-face with him and immediately bursts his bubble. ‘I’m not gay,’ he shrieks when she asks him why his T-shirt is so tight. Big men never looked so small.

One Battle After Another: warrior women

Burning it all down, Taylor’s incendiary turn as self-empowered chaos agent Perfidia kicks off a kinetic film that never stops moving, cut sharp like glass by editor Andy Jurgensen. She blazes an incandescent trail through Michael Bauman’s already smouldering cinematograph, most memorably when machine gun-toting at the tail end of her last trimester, invoking the name of Pacino’s Tony Montana in Scarface. An image later mirrored, minus the bump, by Willa

You can practically feel the crackle of Infiniti’s lighting-strike breakthrough in a physically demanding prole that also requires quiet facial acting. You totally buy Willa’s bravado, brought up to know her way around a gun and hand-to-hand combat, but inexorably fret for her.

Props, too, to her binary-smashing schoolmates, running interference on the hunt.   

Even the smallest of roles shine. All hail Shayna McHayle’s fierce in every sense  resistance fighter, Junglepussy, so-named for the real-life rapper’s stage name. Girls Trip star Regina Hall is on fire, as ever, and somehow Alana Haim makes a mark as fabulously code-named resistance fighter Mae West, despite saying considerably less than her harried mum in Kelly Richardt’s The Mastermind.

We care about these players and their game, a feat that feels increasingly rare in today’s CGI-laden action fare. Bauman bring us bang up to the bumper in the film’s frenetic a car chase sequences, with a tarmac-skidding final act twist on the classic Bullit bit all but shaving skin off us on the dips.

If there’s a microscopic niggle, it’s that Jonny Greenwood’s four to the floor score is both spectacular and a teeny bit too much, at times riding roughshod over quieter dialogue. But it’s entirely forgivable in the absolute brilliance of Anderson’s astounding One Battle After Another, the funnest intergenerational warfare has been in a very long time.

One Battle After Another is in cinemas from 25 September 2025.

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