One Battle After Another (2025)

One Battle After Another (2025)

 

6/10

Starring

Leonardo DiCaprio

Sean Penn

Benicio del Toro

Regina Hall

Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson

 

The moment I saw the runtime, I was scared. My thought was, this will be another passion project that everyone will love, and I’ll be sitting here wondering what’s so great about it.
And I was right.

I have to say, I’m one of those who find this movie just OK. It’s not the great, mind-bending cinema that many critics are raving about. It’s a film I’d say fits streaming better than the big screen, because you can pause, walk away, and come back to it. At almost three hours long, that helps.

Like I said, it’s OK and watchable, but the movie tries to do too much. There are so many subplots and so many characters to keep track of, you might as well take a notepad with you.

Then there are the tonal swings. We start with a political thriller, get pulled into comedy, then family drama, then action thriller. It just jumps around genres.

The movie is written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and it tells the story of Pat/Ghetto (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ex-revolutionist trying to rescue his daughter from a corrupt military official.

To be honest, Leonardo DiCaprio hardly did anything here. Everyone else did the running and heavy lifting. He spends half the movie trying to remember a code to reach the rendezvous point, the other half driving around, getting in and out of lockups while trying to find his daughter.

The movie starts with him and his fellow revolutionists breaking detainees out of an immigration center. Here we meet many of the characters, and acting-wise, everyone delivered. The performances are amazing, even from the side characters.

But then we get dragged into a thirty-minute setup. I could see how that could have been halved and still got the message across. It’s there so we can feel the tension and the betrayal of the revolutionist group, the French 75, when one of them sells the others out. Pat goes into hiding with his daughter, and now they’re hunted by a corrupt government official who cut the deal with the traitor.

He wants to join a white supremacist group, but he fears Willa (Pat’s daughter) might be his. The traitor had been in a relationship with both Lockjaw and Pat, so Lockjaw wants Willa dead in case she is his, leaving no evidence of an interracial relationship.

By the halfway point, the stakes are high and the tension is real. But it took over an hour to get there, and then the pace drops again before picking up toward the end. This uneven pacing really hurt the experience.

In the end, I’ll say it’s a watchable movie, but wow, you could easily shave off an hour. The endless wait for the DNA test, Lockjaw’s drawn-out discussions with the group he wants to join, the debates about how to deal with him, even that long thirty-minute start — all of it could have been trimmed down.