The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison enthuses over ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2025)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s current hit One Battle After Another's notion of the US divided into armed camps may seem very much of the moment but it goes way back - President Walter Huston having the army firing squad line up gangsters against a wall in sight of the Capitol Dome in the 1933 Gabriel Over the White House, campus riots in Richard Rush's 1970 Getting Straight, Robert Kramer’s 1970 ICE (prescient) or Jeremy Kagan’s 1975 Katharine through Spike Lee’s 2018 The Blackklansman, all anticipating Eddington, with it’s discussion of “Whiteness”. This one also goes back over ground covered in the Lumet Running on Empty and its fugitive sixties activist family.

It’s hard to pin down Anderson’s style. I find I forget his films, though it is easy to pick up their first run-throughs of ideas used here - agitated Adam Sandler, playing a reel with the telephone he yanked out of the wall still in his hand in Punch Drunk Love, foreshadows ego-free lead, unshaven Leonardo De Caprio “stoned, disheveled and wearing a robe & department store glasses.”

 

Star Leonardo is first seen instructing his black lover Teyana Taylor on wiring bombs for their U.S. underground “French 75” Unit for a raid on the (ICE) Otay Mesa Immigration Detention Centre, situated in the shadow of a massive Trumpy Border Wall, which they penetrate with their briefcase bombs to plant in the toilets. However Sean Penn’s U.S. Task Force Commander S. J. Lockjaw (an action movie in which both the hero and the villain are comic  misfits) catches her in the act and turns her, with a bit of added sex blackmail which he will spin as “reverse rape.”  He arrives  with a bunch of flowers, at the house she has fled to reappear with a battering ram. Penn conspicuously adjusts his military version Donald Trump hair-do  at one point.

 

Taylor bales, leaving Leonardo to raise the baby, who grows to be Chase Infiniti, laying low with disintegrating dad Leonardo in a Chicken Shack owned house in the Baktan Cross California woods. Just when we are sure where our sympathy is being directed, it’s the transgender member in her teen age peer group posse that rats out Chase, when they are captured at their high school  dance by Penn’s off the books military. 

   

Benicio del Toro, the sensei at the small town Dojo, proves to be the leader of the local underground cell. The rug there is programmed to roll back over the trapdoor, after the fugitive unregistered immigrants have exited into its tunnel. When Leonardo, crawling across the floor to avoid a passing cop car, asks for a weapon, Benicio offers nunchuks. 

 

How desirable it is to put up the image of America divided between a massive, cheery Antifa underground and secret so-rich Christian elite lodge brothers is questionable but it does make for a great night at the movies. 

 

Two brilliant chase sequences give this one the edge on most competition - the sustained piano-backed roof top parkour escape, from the ground level military by skate board fugitives, fields De Caprio, caught after crashing to earth only to be turned loose by the co-conspirator hospital nurse, who just tells him the way out. The action moves on to the set piece long lens travelings on the remote undulating highway, where the cars dip  from view. It would be interesting to know how they obtained those steady moving telephoto images. We get the surprise appearance of a third element in the chase, which this lot may have spotted when it worked a treat in Ron Howard’s 2003 The Missing.This is the first time I’ve seen a DNA analysis used to provide suspense. 

 

The final Coda showing our protagonists’ later life is agreeable.

 

One Battle After Another distinguishes itself on every level - as an action entertainment, as a demonstration of superior film craft and as a think piece on the condition of the America we are seeing  in the TV News. If there hadn’t been a recent burst of superior films, I’d have thought it was a clear choice for movie of the moment.