Paul Thomas Anderson just made the kind of movie that makes you remember why theaters exist. One Battle After Another blasts out of the gate with a lean premise and then keeps stacking tension and character beats until you are gripping the armrest like it owes you money. It is a bruiser of a film and somehow also tender with a little “Girl Dad” energy. It is loud and funny and then quietly devastating when you least expect it. The crazy part is how effortless it all feels.
I made a 7 a.m. media screening at Fantastic Fest, which is not a sentence I make a habbit of saying often. I cannot recall the last time I chose a dawn screening over sleep for a nearly three hour film. Only a few titles in existence may be worth that kind of effort, and this one did. I have no regrets at all. Within five minutes into the film, the action was jolting, and coffee was optional. Here is the setup.
The plot on paper is simple. A long dormant threat returns. Former revolutionaries crawl out of their old lives. A father who is equal parts lovable and a bit infuriating must save his daughter while outrunning the ripple effects of bad choices he made in years prior. The movie uses that frame like as a springboard that causes each scene to bounce higher. Every cut feeds the momentum of the movie and you can practically feel the timer in the final cut.
The performances are a masterpiece featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as a shambling true believer who lost the thread. His character spends a lot of time getting high and looking for a way to charge his phone, getting big laughs just by fumbling through a basic task. Sean Penn builds a complex villain out of posture with lots of tiny choices that snowball into a menacing, troubled figure you will not forget. Teyana Taylor arrives with a forceful presence and suddenly leaves with the movie’s soul. Chase Infinity is the breakout, sharp and alive in every scene with the kind of debut that made me sit up and take instant notice because I know I’m watching what’s likely to become a huge star in the making in real time. Benicio Del Toro glides through the movie like a wise man who remains calm and collected as if he has better instincts than anyone else, but only in a cool way that only he can do.
What really cooks is the tone control. There are multiple laugh-out-loud scenes that opens the door to something raw and human in the next beat. Jokes come from strong character interactions that never feel like slapstick cheap shots. A running scene with a dead phone becomes a pressure cooker and a hilarious opera about our modern dependence on always having a charged device, and the final button on that gag is a crowd pleaser.
On the craft side, this thing is a flex. The camera moves with purpose. The chase sequences are cut like a drum solo, precise and muscular, and they are built with real geography you can track. You always know where the threat is and how close it is to ruining people you now care about. Production design pulls double duty as world building. Everything looks used and lived in. Nothing feels like a prop. The score threads a simple motif through chaos until your pulse starts syncing to it. Needle drops are placed with a mischievous grin. The sound mix lets engines growl and then falls to a whisper when a father and daughter finally hear each other.
Under the thrills, there is a clear spine holding the movie together when character ideals calcify into identity and identity becomes a costume they forget to take off. It is about parenthood and the bill that arrives when you spend years outrunning responsibility. It is about a country that loves a righteous cause and also loves convenience and what it costs to chase both. None of this is delivered as homework. You feel it in decisions, in stares, in the way a crowd turns, in the way a family tries to glue itself back together while the room shakes.
There are moments that feel like they got smuggled in from a different era of studio filmmaking. Practical danger in real scale. Jokes that do not apologize with a story that trusts the audience to connect the dots. The overall pace is wild for a film that stretches past two and a half hours. I even checked the time on my phone once and was kind-of disappointed at how little time was left.
Overall the film feels bigger than the frame it’s limited to, which may lead you to replay scenes in your mind and invent the potential for other scenes between them. That is cinema as conversation.
Final verdict: 5 / 5 Buckets of Popcorn
One Battle After Another is an absolute banger and one I’ll likely watch in theaters at least twice. It is the best kind of big-screen experience and the kind you must drag your friends to so you can watch their faces during a few specific scenes that I will not spoil. It is a chase movie with a heart, a humorous character study that moderately reflects what we see in the current American political climate, that leaves you wondering if there are any traces of this fable happening in real-time behind closed doors. But it never forgets to entertain.