I have a bit of a complicated relationship with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. I am generally unimpressed by his movies, with the exception of Boogie Nights. But Boogie Nights is probably my favorite movie of all time. So, whenever there’s a new PTA movie released, I keep hoping that somehow, some way, he will make another movie as good as Boogie Nights.
Well, I need to keep waiting and hoping, because One Battle After Another is not that movie.
One Battle After Another stars Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon) as a guy known only as Bob Ferguson. This is a false ID, as Bob is a member of a domestic terrorist organization called The French 75 and, after one of the members turned state’s evidence, is in hiding along with his daughter, Willa (also a false name, and played by Presumed Innocent’s Chase Infiniti). Bob and Willa’s peaceful existence is cut short when a bad-ass military colonel named Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn from Milk and Mystic River) finds a more personal reason to hunt them down—and uses all of his connections—legal and illegal—to do it.
Paul Thomas Anderson adapted his screenplay for One Battle After Another from the novel Vineland by novelist Thomas Pynchon (who also wrote the novel upon which PTA based Inherent Vice). It’s a pretty loose adaptation, actually more of an “inspired by” than an “adapted from.” It’s a modernized telling, almost ripped from today’s headlines. And that’s part of the problem with the movie.
One Battle After Another tries to be timely and political, but it doesn’t really try hard enough. The social injustices that The French 75 are fighting are things like immigration camps and big banks, but these issues are glossed over in the name of entertainment. There’s no real statement made, just bullets shot and rockets launched. It’s obvious who are the heroes and who are the villains, but it seems like a wasted opportunity to take a stand. Which, for a movie that is completely about political turmoil, is just odd.
From a cinematic standpoint, of course PTA knows how to make a technically good movie. For the most part, One Battle After Another looks and sounds great. It even includes what is possibly one of the greatest car chase scenes ever committed to film. But story-wise, it’s all over the place. DiCaprio’s Bob is just as silly as the paranoid druggie trying to evade the law as Penn’s Lockjaw is as the stereotypical, hard-nosed soldier trying to find him (and there will never be a better name for a hard-nosed soldier than Colonel Lockjaw).
One Battle After Another is being pushed as a comedy, but despite Colonel Lockjaw’s incredible name, there’s very little to laugh at in the movie. This just adds to the film’s identity crisis. It’s an action thriller, and a typical one at that. And while there are fun points (see the aforementioned car chase), most of it is pretty by-the-numbers. Sure, Benicio Del Toro (who made two better movies like this with Traffic and Sicario) pops in as a karate sensei who provides a few grins, but there’s not too much in the movie as a whole to cheer about, much less laugh at. It’s just a lot of shooting and chasing. Rinse and repeat.
The best aspect of the movie is easily Jonny Greenwood’s score. The Radiohead guitarist and PTA’s go-to composer is on point here, delivering a toned-down, dissonant piano score that seems all wrong for a movie about ex-revolutionaries running from a mad colonel. But it works so well.
One Battle After Another is all style and no substance. And it really could have had a lot of substance with the right treatment. Maybe if PTA had set his version in the same Reagan-era time period as Pynchon’s novel? Who knows? All I do know is that Boogie Nights is still far and away PTA’s best movie.
GRADE: C-
Rating: R for pervasive language, drug use, sexual content, and violence
Running Time: 2 hours 41 minutes
Release Date: September 26, 2025
Studio: Warner Bros Pictures
This post was last modified on March 19, 2026 2:02 pm