Warning: This article contains spoilers.
Reviews of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another have been extremely positive, with many calling it one of the best films of the year. But after seeing it, I am disappointed to say that is not the case. One Battle After Another certainly isn’t a bad movie, but it’s held back by key flaws.
Set in contemporary America, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Pat Calhoun, a demolitions expert and former member of the fictional French 75 revolutionaries, fighting against the crackdown on Mexican immigration. Pat and his young daughter Charlene (Chase Infiniti) are forced into hiding when his wife Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) rats out the rest of the rebel cell to Pat’s nemesis, Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Sixteen years later, with Lockjaw back on their trail, Pat and Charlene are forced back into the world of insurgents and soldiers as they desperately try to find each other, with the aid of French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall) and sensei/immigrant leader Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro).
My favorite aspect of this film is undoubtedly the performances, especially that of Taylor. Even though she’s not in the film for long, her fiery and passionate performance as a rebel leader permeates throughout the runtime, and the movie sadly suffers when her character exits the narrative. That being said, DiCaprio and Infiniti pick up the slack. DiCaprio really sells a washed-up paranoid revolutionary who can’t even remember the secret codes his group used. Meanwhile, Infiniti proves herself a rising star with her portrayal of the young spitfire Charlene. She most easily fills the void left by Taylor during the second chapter of the film, and her chemistry with DiCaprio is genuine and believable — I wish there were more of it. They feel like a father and a daughter who are trying to survive in a world that seems entirely against them.
I also loved many of the technical aspects. There has been extensive clamor over how expensive this movie is, but you can hardly deny that the money comes through on screen; the cinematography is especially great. Anderson shot the film with VistaVision cameras, which haven’t been widely used since the ’50s. This choice gives the film a more tactile and old-school feel to all of the shots, setting it apart from your standard big-budget action movie fare.
The runtime is where I start to have issues with this film. A lot of films can justify a near three-hour runtime, and for what it’s worth, I think One Battle After Another is overall paced very well. Still, some scenes didn’t need to make the final cut. The subplot where Charlene and Deandra hide out with a coven of nuns is wholly unneeded; it basically never overlaps with Pat’s journey and has little impact on Charlene’s. And while Lockjaw’s seeming death was shocking and kind of funny, we didn’t need a scene of him walking it off only to be assassinated a second time.
My biggest problem with the film is that it has a bit of an identity crisis. The movie tries to balance a personal story set around Pat and Charlene with a larger revolutionary narrative between the French 75 and the military. But the film doesn’t dive deep enough into either of these plots. There aren’t nearly enough scenes with Pat and Charlene together, even though they have great chemistry. There was a long sequence where the military invades a sanctuary city where Pat and Charlene are hiding, and I thought that would’ve been a good time for the two opposing forces to have a direct clash. However, the French 75 never show up; we focus instead on Carlos and his friends fighting back. Overall, both of the film’s angles are underbaked.
One Battle After Another feels like two movies. The first chapter sets up a genuinely interesting guerrilla warfare/revolution plot, while the second chapter is more personal yet also tries to incorporate the revolution plot in weird ways. Picking one angle could’ve massively improved the final product. However, as it stands, One Battle After Another is an extremely passionate movie that does a lot right and means well, but is sadly a flawed mess at the same time.
