Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Benecio Del Toro, and Chase Infiniti
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Rated R
Streaming on HBOMAX
First Impression: Director Paul Thomas Anderson has come out swinging with a career best in One Battle After Another. It’s a unique subversive take on revolutionaries, how they spark and how powerful government forces and secret societies linked to them aim to take them down. Sean Penn gives a near career best performance here as Colonel Lockjaw. This is a villain role that will live in infamy for decades to come. We also get stellar performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Benecio Del Toro who in limited screen time also puts in a career best performance as well. And I also have to mention the performance of newcomer Chase Infiniti who does more than just hold her own with Hollywood heavyweights like DiCaprio, Penn and Del Toro. She shines bright when given the opportunity and I’m excited to watch her in future projects to come.
When you think about it when we discuss past revolutions and revolutionary characters we always tend to romanticize them whether it be Che Guevara in the Cuban revolution to Vladimir Lenin and Leo Trotsky in the Russian Revolution to Emilio Zapata and Pancho Villa in the Mexican revolution we see these characters as almost folk heroes who are more myth than man we see them as fighting the good fight to help the poorest and most vulnerable. But that’s usually where the discussion ends. We never talk about the blowback and the after effects of the exciting and thrilling part of the story. Because as we have seen from countless examples, revolutionary history isn’t always a happy ending and the people who were once idolized and adored can turn into people unrecognizable and detested.
And that is exactly what Paul Thomas Anderson who’s most well-known for his previous films There will be Blood and Boogie nights gives us with One Battle After Another. We see the rise and fall of a fictional revolutionary movement called The French 75 headed by DiCaprio’s character Bob Ferguson and his just as wreck less but exciting girlfriend Teyana Taylor’s character Perfidia Beverly Hills we see them causing mischief and chaos for the overarching villain Colonel Lockjaw (Penn) and how Lockjaw falls in love with Perfidia and the complicated results of that fatal attraction. Anderson shows us the fall of The French 75 with the arrest of Perfidia Beverley Hills and Colonel Lockjaw giving her a lifeline to avoid prison if she “names names” of her fellow revolutionaries. All this happens in the first 20 minutes of the movie. The real movie starts 15 years later with Bob and his Daughter Willa (Infiniti) hiding out and living off the grid after Peridia betrayed the movement. But old nemesis don’t go away so easily as Colonel Lockjaw has been invited to a secret society and in order to join he needs to take care of some past transgressions like eliminating Bob and Willa all together.
That’s as much of the plot as I want to give away for now. One Battle After Another was very hyped when it was announced and I’m here to say that it lived up to the hype and then some. I was pleasantly surprised and will be waiting to see how many Oscar nominations it will receive.
Final Verdict 5 out of 5 Stars
