One Battle After Another (2025)
Nothing makes our heart beat faster than a film whose director threw caution to the wind and swung for the fences.....
Sure, the results can be sloppy, messy, overlong, uneven in tone and sometimes even ridiculous. All part of the risk....that is, if the filmmaker's unafraid to take it.
But you know what? That's how truly great movies tha stand the test of time come into this world.....flawed, but brimming with a fierce ambitious fervor, an in-your-face insistence that can't be denied or ignored.
And that sums up 'One Battle....' written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who took his inspiration from the Thomas Pynchon novel 'Vineland'.
Conceived as a sprawling epic of violent clashes between opposing forces of American zealots, Anderson lets it all play out in front of a more intimate primal story......that of a wayward father trying to reconnect with a daughter all but lost to him amid the social and political upheavals they've been sucked into.
Sound too heavy for words? Not at all, since PTA views these feverish melodramatics with a winking satiric eye, much like Stanley Kubrick accomplished in "Dr. Strangelove".......a dryly humorous, sly view of the war between authoritarians and those who consider it their holy mission to resist them.
We start some years back, where explosives expert Pat 'Rocketman' Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) blows stuff up for left wing revolutionaries 'The French 75', along side one of its guiding lights, Pat's fiery, ferocious partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, in an award worthy performance.)
Perfidia, a powerhouse force, caught the mad, mad eye of the military scourge of radicals, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) She's not above using sex as a weapon against the conflicted, sexually obsessed loon ; she escapes him to drop out of sight, leaving a hapless Pat to raise their baby daughter Willa. Some 16 years later, Pat's a drug addicted drunk couch potato but teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) has her mother's aggressive, independent moxie and deeply resents what Pat's reduced himself to.
The fanatical Lockjaw, now in charge of rounding up illegal immigrants, has also joined a cabal of fascist, racist American oligarchs who've dubbed themselves the Christmas Adventurers Club. Fearing this slimy bunch will revoke his membership if they discover his forbidden passion for Perfidia, he sets his gunsights on Willa. And this finally rouses Pat to save his daughter with the help of the French 75 and Willa's Karate class Sensei, who also engineers immigrant escape routes. (Benicio del Toro, as deadpan hilarious as he is in Wes Anderson's films.)
The other renowned Anderson, Paul Thomas, keeps 'One Battle' in constant bubbling, boiling motion, with bravura filmmaking every step of the way. Everyone in the cast, from DiCaprio down to the actors with only brief screen time, all work at the very top of their game. Special mention must go to Jonny Greenwood's startling score, sometimes erupting in ear grabbing percussion when the stakes are raised.
On this film, we at BQ cast our vote with the consensus already arrived at by most critics.....it easily takes its place as one of the best films of the year, a must watch for all cinephiles. 5 stars (*****).
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