One Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio’s 5-star thriller

There are still people around that saw the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt when it was originally in cinemas in 1968.

You can imagine what that must have been like, to see the king of cool zoom over the hills of San Francisco in that highland green Mustang, the audience’s breath held in, eyes popping as they reckoned with what they had never seen before.

That now iconic car chase sequence set the standard for decades to come. There is no Fast and Furious, Gone in 60 Seconds or Drive without it.

That’s what it felt like to watch One Battle After Another on the big screen, which features its own chase sequence that is so hypnotic and impressive, you may not realise that you haven’t blinked for 45 seconds.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and relative newcomer Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another could very well be the best picture winner at the next Oscars.

It’s not just that it is superbly crafted on every level, it is also properly entertaining. It has a momentum that propels everything forward always, and never wavers in capturing and holding your attention – one of the very few long movies where you don’t at all feel the drag of its runtime of two hours and 50 minutes.

One Battle After Another tells the story of Bob (DiCaprio), who was a political revolutionary in the late-2000s, part of a group called the French 75. They raided detention centres, banks, and planted bombs in government buildings.

Bob is involved with another member, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), whose commitment to the cause is unquestionable and unrelenting. During one raid, she disarms Steven J. Lockjaw (Penn), a formidable army colonel who becomes obsessed with Perfidia.

Flash forward 16 years and Perfidia is in the wind, but before her final stand, she gave birth to a daughter, Willa (Infiniti), who has been living under an assumed name with Bob in a small town in California.

While Bob’s paranoia has never dimmed, neither his instincts nor memory are as sharp as they were, so when Lockjaw re-emerges as a threat, chaos rains down on everyone.

The story seems relatively simple, but it’s how writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson pulls it off that matters.

On a technical level, every performance is on point – Taylor’s fierce revolutionary, Infiniti’s Willa as strength and smarts that evoke her mother’s but is still entirely her own, DiCaprio’s befuddled and stressful energy that is always underpinned by love, Penn’s almost Terminator-esque Lockjaw, and del Toro as Sergio St. Carlos, a local businessman who also coordinates an underground refuge for immigrants.

The editing is fast-paced and urgent, but never confusing, while the dialogue is sharp.

What works best is that Anderson has created this story – inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland – that has this universally resonant story about a father and daughter at the centre of a film that is in direct conversation with the current moment of political division and extremes.

The villainous Lockjaw runs a military unit that is analogous to ICE (the US’s immigration and customs enforcement agency) and raids a sanctuary city with his goons, including implanting his own people among the protestors as cover for their actions. Lockjaw is also trying to pledge membership to an underground cabal of white supremacists.

It’s significant that the opening shot of One Battle After Another is a detention centre on the US-Mexico border – that is not an apolitical choice in 2025 – while in another scene, you see children locked up in cages, using tin foil as makeshift toys.

But that doesn’t mean the revolutionaries are pure-play heroes either. They don’t believe in incarcerating kids but they love to fire very destructive weapons.

Anderson doesn’t offer a solution – who even has one, these days – nor is it just a polemic, but One Battle After Another has a clear-minded perspective about extremism and fascism, all threaded through a thrilling, accessible package.

Anderson is one of the most well-regarded filmmakers still working but most of his movies (Magnolia, Phantom Thread, The Master) can be a little esoteric for the most mainstream of audiences.

There Will Be Blood’s $US76 million global box office is the most an Anderson movie has ever made, and there had originally been much confusion as to why Warner Bros greenlit this film with a reported production budget of at least $US130 million.

The finished film is why. If the studio’s marketing arm can get the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood audience to turn up for One Battle After Another, this could be a blockbuster hit as well as a critical darling.

There’s no reason why it shouldn’t have excellent word-of-mouth when it is so satisfying and compelling. Unless, of course, in the upside-down world of American politics, the film gets caught up in some bad faith hate campaign waged by the pro-fascism gang.

Here’s hoping moviegoers turn out for One Battle After Another, because it will be deeply rewarding of their time, money and attention.

Rating: 5/5

One Battle After Another is in cinemas on September 25