Movie Review: One Battle After Another (2025)

For a month now, friends and family have been virtually tapping me on the shoulder to ask if I�d seen �One Battle After Another� yet. Everyone urged me to go. K. thought it was great, A. said he enjoyed it, R. said it was the best movie he�d seen in years.

Last weekend, Patricia and I finally saw it at SIFF Downtown. And almost from the get-go I was disappointed.

The movie feels both hugely relevant and comically beside-the-point. We get a fictional continuation of our past amid what feels like our very real, authoritarian present and future. Politically, it damns both sides but does it in a way that feels like each�s attack on the other. Left-wing revolutionaries whining about their personal space? That�s an �SNL� skit. And when was the last time left-wing guerillas blew shit up�The Weather Underground?

That was actually the problem I had from the get-go. We watch as left-wing revolutionaries, self-dubbed French 75, and led by the dynamic and hypersexual Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), liberate prison camps and take on the man, and I�m like: It�s as if the Weather Underground kept going. I didn�t know the title actually comes from the Weather Underground. One of its many manifestoes:

�From here on out, it�s one battle after another�with white youth joining in the fight and taking the necessary risks. Pig Amerika beware. There's an army growing in your guts and it's going to bring you down.�

In real life, of course, when the risks came down, white youth got good jobs, voted for Reagan, moved to the suburbs.

The criticisms I have of the movie, by the way, are couched with trepidation. Whenever I see a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, I�m both impressed and vaguely disappointed, and when I write about it I tend to lead with the disappointment but by the end I want to see the film again. Particularly the So Cal/Thomas Pynchon-inspired stuff: �The Master,� �Inherent Vice.� I want to rewatch �Inherent Vice� now. I barely remember anything about it, but back in the day I wrote the following, which jumps out at me after seeing �One Battle�:

There�s a sense here, and throughout the movie, that this is where we went wrong. During this pivotal moment, the left got stoned while the right got busy.

This dynamic, from the review, also feels relevant to “One Battle”:

They�re led by Lt. Det. Christian F. �Bigfoot� Bjornsen (Josh Brolin, in a standout performance), a crew-cutted chest-thumper, who earned his nickname by beating up suspects, and who has a comic oral fixation with black phallic symbols�mostly chocolate-covered bananas.

Or are such fixations just relevant to PTA? Maybe he's working through some shit. Well, who isn�t?

The Ethan dilemma
Have any black critics weighed in with concerns about the sexualization of black women? It�s not just Perfidia; there�s Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle), who struts along a bank table, mid-robbery, toting a machine gun and wearing the shortest of miniskirts with legs that go on forever. Meanwhile, Perfidia isn�t just the lover of the droopy explosives expert Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), first seen in hoodie pulling a wagon like he�s some bizarro continuation of Elliott from �E.T.�; no, she also takes it to the enemy, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). At first it seems she�s humiliating him? Forcing him to get a hard-on at gunpoint and parading him around? But he digs it, and she digs it, and they wind up lovers; and when she�s caught, she gives up the whole lot of them, all of French 75, while also giving up her daughter and fleeing to Mexico. She�s a dirty rat, to coin a phrase. I guess the clue was in the name.

Then we fast-forward 15 years to a time when the faux Weather Underground is even further underground, irrelevant except in their own minds. It�s the right-wing authoritarian forces who have a strut in their step. Or a stomp.

Lockjaw, no worse for wear, is invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret org of wealthy white supremacists; but as they consider his membership, they ask if he�s ever been involved in an interracial relationship. He denies it, of course, in a way that feels just slight off (Penn: chef�s kiss); then he uses his full power and authority to track down and remove evidence of past infidelities.

The true irrelevance of French 75 is that, with the will, which Lockjaw now has, they can be found in a moment; that they weren�t for 15 years indicates how much they didn�t matter. But it�s a horror show that Lockjaw, a mere colonel, can set all of this in motion: high schools are rousted, streets burned, lives lost and upended, all in a search for Perfidia�s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), a high school student raised by the perpetually stoned Bob.

Got to give it to Penn: Even within the confines of his caricature, a limping, rigid man who often seems more G.I. Joe doll than human being, we still wonder what he�ll do if/when he finds her. It�s an Ethan Edwards moment, isn�t it? Hadn�t thought of that until now. He could pick her up and say, �Let�s go home, Debbie.� But that�s a heroic move and he�s not the hero here.

Who is the hero here? Not Bob. He�s a bathrobed stumblebum, unable to remember his side�s passwords and passcodes as he tries to check in and get safe. He�s Jeff Lebowski caught in the crossfire.

Willa? She�s smart, tough, knows her stuff, can deal with both generations. She�s also hostage for half the film.

I�d go with Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), Willa�s martial arts instructor. He�s another guy we�re wondering over as Bob shows up at his door, pursued and desperate, but every step of the way Sergio is calm, purposeful and helpful. He keeps his head while the town is engulfed.�He�s also, it turns out, his people�s Harriet Tubman. While tempests rage on either side, right wing pursuing left, he�s the still middle getting things done and keeping the underground railroad moving. After he�s saved Bob�s ass yet again, he�s pulled over by the cops, arms raised, bemused, doing a little dance as part of his sobriety test, admitting, with a twinkle, to having had a few beers. It�s such a great moment, it makes the return to the main storyline a disappointment. It�s the last we see him.

The stupidity and the tyranny
Afterwards I asked Patricia who scared her most, and she said the old guy with the Christmas club: one-time �Emergency!� co-star Kevin Tighe. �For me,� I said, �it was the guy who was questioning the high school kids. He seemed real.�

And he is. Per IMDb:

Lockjaw's second-in-command and chief interrogator, Danvers, is played by a non-professional actor: James 'Jim' Raterman, a security consultant and former HSI Special Agent.

Expect to see him in other shit.

During the high school interrogations, a trans friend gives up Willa�s phone, and she�s tracked and found in a nunnery, where Lockjaw hauls her into the chapel to perform a DNA test. Yep, she�s his. He�s no Ethan, of course; there�s no going home for the two of them. But he can�t bring himself to kill her, so he contacts the Native American bounty hunter, Avanti Q (Eric Schweig), who�d set the search in motion. Avanti won�t do it, either�he�s a tracker, not a killer�but takes double the money to deliver her to a right-wing militia. Except the men there hardly acknowledge Avanti�s existence except to call him �Wagon Burner�; and his mind is changed about the whole dirty enterprise. After the gunfight, only Willa lives.

Oh right. The Christmas org has done its own research on Lockjaw, doesn�t like what it�s found, and brings in the completely nondescript Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker), who talks banana pancakes with a Mrs. before being told by the higher-ups to terminate the colonel�s command. He shows up on a lonely desert road and shoots Lockjaw in the face.

Is he also pursuing Willa? Or does she simply feel pursued? Either way we get that great roller-coast shot of Southwestern hills and dales, onto which Willa leaves a gift: Avanti�s car in a blind spot for Tim to crash into. When he doesn�t know the passcode response, she kills him. She nearly does the same with Bob, since he obviously doesn�t know the response, either. But he gets her to stand down and they embrace.

I would�ve ended there. I didn�t need a bloody-faced and disfigured Lockjaw walking back to civilization and into the arms of the Christmas club, who welcome him only to gas him to death in his office. (I do like how plain the office is�the office for which Lockjaw risked everything.) Then we get Bob and Willa in the aftermath. She�s off to a protest in Oakland, he�s trying to figure out smartphones. But isn�t he still a wanted criminal? So isn�t the smartphone dangerous? Or does he no longer feel pursued with Lockjaw dead?

I�ve often complained that PTA�s movies aren�t focused enough, and this one finally is � and I liked it less. So I guess that was never the problem. Plus I�ve reached the end of this review and�save for Benicio�I�m not gungho to revisit “One Battle.” Sorry.

But I am gungho to rewatch PTA. His movies often feature conflicts between two men: a stern one tending toward tyranny and a lost one tending toward chaos.

Daniel Plainview vs. Paul Sunday
Lancaster Dodd vs. Freddie Quell
Bigfoot vs. Doc Sportello
Col. Steven J. Lockjaw vs. Bob

In most, the two men share the screen. Not here. I think it�s just the one scene? In the supermarket? Question: In the other movies, is there a middle-ground figure, the space occupied by St. Carlos? Or did Benicio carve that out for himself?

I�ll give �One Battle� this: It tackles the horror and absurdity of the world today�no mean feat. It's also comforting to know that, amid the stupidity and the tyranny, there may be a calm man somewhere, doing a bemused jig in the police lights, getting shit done.