One Battle After Another: A Review - The Art of Cinema Loses Another Battle

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

One Battle After Another, written and directed by acclaimed auteur Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, tells the story of Bob (DiCaprio), a revolutionary fighting the fascist powers that be while trying to keep himself and his family safe.

The film, which is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, and stars Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Tayana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, opened on September 26th and has been praised by critics and seen a modestly successful return at the box office – over $100 million, the biggest of Anderson’s career (with a budget of $150 million or so – also the largest of Anderson’s career, it has a long way to go to profitability).

Paul Thomas Anderson has long been the darling of film bros, and as long-time readers know I am the film bro-iest of film bros, so Anderson is my favorite filmmaker and I consider him to be the greatest filmmaker of our time. Anderson’s talent with the typewriter, the camera and particularly with actors, is undeniable. His filmography is proof of this as it includes a bevy of extraordinary masterpieces (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as well as a handful of exquisite and brilliant arthouse gems (Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread).

I found Anderson’s last film, Licorice Pizza, to be a disappointment. It was beautifully shot but beyond that it was a rather empty venture devoid of meaning or purpose.

So it was that I was somewhat trepidatious when going to see One Battle After Another. Despite my long-standing practice of embargoing information about films I’m interested in, news seeped through the blockade and I heard whispers about how One Battle After Another was fantastic.

In order to find out if that were the case, I went to a sparsely populated Sunday matinee at the local cineplex here in flyover country. The film was shot using VistaVision – a rarely used practice that can only truly be appreciated in like four movie theatres in America – and mine certainly wasn’t one of them. No, I watched the film like the rest of the hoi polloi – on a very shitty digital projector.

After sitting through the expansive two-hour and forty-five-minute runtime, my take away from One Battle After Another is this…it just doesn’t work. It isn’t funny, or even mildly interesting or the slightest bit profound. In fact, the only thing profound about this movie is how disappointing it is. It is such a misfire it makes the tediously middling Licorice Pizza seem like Citizen Kane.

As previously stated, I saw the movie on a digital projector, so take this with a grain of salt, but I also did not find the film technologically or cinematically impressive in the slightest.

When the film ended and I walked back out into the blinding daylight, I was stunned at what an underwhelming experience I had just endured. It was shocking to me that an enormous talent like PT Anderson could create such a lifeless movie that fails to stir even the slightest bit of a spark from such acting luminaries as Leo DiCaprio and Sean Penn.

One Battle After Another is garnering a cavalcade of critical adoration – not surprising considering two things – Anderson’s well-earned status as an elite auteur, and also the film’s political subject matter.

The film is essentially about a revolutionary group fighting a fascist government that rounds up illegal aliens – if it were a Law and Order episode they’d say it was “ripped from the headlines”. The specter – or odor, depending on your political perspective, of the Trump administration hangs over this movie like a ghost of Christmas past, present and, unfortunately, future.

No doubt critics, and most audience members, will get a thrill from the fight against fascists at the heart of the film. The problem though is that the film’s politics are both ludicrously heavy handed yet compulsively vapid, vacuous and trite. If you want to see a much better (and very different) film about modern-day violent revolutionaries, go watch 2022’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline – a flawed but feverishly compelling film.

Tonally One Battle After Another, labelled an action-thriller, struggles as well, as there is minimal action and even less thrills. Anderson’s other adaptation of a Pynchon novel, 2014’s Inherent Vice, was a weird and woolly conspiracy crime comedy, and I thought it was a wonderful piece of cinema and supremely psychologically profound. One Battle After Another is never as funny as Inherent Vice, and never as smart and certainly not even remotely as profound either.

I laughed exactly once watching this movie, and it was when a flustered DiCaprio tries to close a curtain and the curtain falls to the floor and he is left puzzled as to what to do next…and then apologizes. The rest of the time I was, as was the rest of the audience, as silent as the grave.

There were some amusing observations in the movie, particularly about the generational divide when it comes to revolution – the fragile Millennial/Gen Z woke keyboard warriors versus Gen-X’s hearty bomb-throwers…but that was minimal and not especially insightful.

As for the performances, much was anticipated when news came out that Leonardo DiCaprio would be teaming with PT Anderson…like a dynamic duo of generational talents.

DiCaprio gives, frankly, a rather forgettable performance as Bob, the stoner revolutionary trying to navigate life in the underground. Never once does he command attention, or feel as if he fully inhabits the character. To be fair, DiCaprio is not aided by the script, which has his flaccid character often deeply at odds with himself.

Sean Penn fares even worse. It has often been said of late that Sean Penn looks like all three of the Three Stooges combined, and that was never more-true than as his work as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, an obsessive and ambitious military man hot on the trail of revolutionaries.

Penn, an actor I greatly admire, gives a frivolous and forgettable performance as the fiery Lockjaw. He is all hat and no cattle. An empty vessel floating aimlessly through the doldrums of a poorly written script.

Regina Hall seems to be in a different, and much better, movie with her performance as Deandra, a revolutionary. Hall is grounded and human as Deandra, which is considerably more than anyone else in the cast can say.

Benicio del Toro does Benicio del Toro things and sort of waltzes calmly and coolly through his role as Sergio, a martial arts instructor and underground railroad engineer. Not once does he seem like anything other than a character in a movie.

Chase Infiniti is so lightweight as Willa, Bob’s daughter, she might as well have been a tumbleweed rolling silently through her scenes.

And then there is Teyana Taylor in the crucial role of Perfidia Beverly Hills – the most important revolutionary…and Bob’s wife and Willa’s mother.

Perfidia is supposed to be this dynamic, magnetic and undeniable energy who carries the revolution – and the first act of the movie, on her back with panache and flair. But Taylor is, unfortunately, a rather repulsive screen presence, which makes her being the object of attention and fetishized desire a rather ridiculous notion – so much so that it is unbelievable.

Taylor lacks the charisma and presence to pull off this vital role and the film is mortally wounded by it from the get go…and then DiCaprio and Penn stick their stakes through its heart all thanks to Anderson’s unfocused and unpolished script.

PT Anderson making two sub-par films back-to-back (Licorice Pizza and One Battle After Another) is an earth-shattering experience for me the poor little Gen X film bro. For the majority of my adult-hood he has been the guy. He has consistently been brilliant (the one notable exception is, thanks to the abysmal Adam Sandler, 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love), and to see him stumble twice in a row is jarring to say the least.

I hope I am wrong, but this feels like when in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Muhammad Ali, the greatest of all time, lost his athleticism and his mojo. Ali shockingly lost to Leon Spinks in 1978 – but then got his belt back by beating Spinks eight months later. But even in victory Ali looked like the shadow of the great fighter and man he once was.

Two years later Ali was destroyed by Larry Holmes in one of the more brutal reality checks in boxing history. A year later he suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of Trevor Burbick, thus ending his once glorious career.

PT Anderson’s most recent two films are not as bad as Ali’s last two fights…but they do feel the same to me. A giant of a talent losing his mojo and being humbled by Father Time is never pretty to watch.

The positive critical reaction to what I see as the failure of One Battle After Another is reminiscent of those who cheered when Ali got his title back from Spinks…thinking the great champion “still had it”. Despite the victory, he still didn’t have it. He was done. My great, great fear, is that the same is true of PT Anderson…not so much that he is done as a filmmaker, but that his best work is behind him and that it is all downhill from here. That is a terrifying notion to me as it signals that this once in my lifetime filmmaker is…just like me…coming ever closer to his end, both artistically and physically. And also…what the hell am I going to look forward to if I don’t have PT Anderson films to look forward to anymore?

Ultimately, it truly pains me to say that One Battle After Another is a rolling morass of banality and bullshit that never coalesces into a successful cinematic venture. To be blunt…it is not very good. Now, to be clear, PT Anderson’s version of not very good is considerably better than everybody else’s…but it is still not very good, and is certainly not a film I will recommend. I will watch it again though, as Anderson has earned that at a minimum with his past work, but upon first viewing, I found trying to find something good to say about One Battle After Another to be a losing battle.

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