One Battle After Another (2025)

Watched 9/25/25 (theater)

One Battle After Another felt to me like a battle between varying tones and dialogue that was all over the map. There are a couple of thrillingly funny performances and some line readings that will stick with me. But I just could not for the life of me reconcile the bizarro, fascist, near-future, Alice-in-Wonderland setup with the broad comedy AND familial drama. One or two were bound not to blend together out of sheer overstuffing.

First and foremost, the familial drama did not do a thing for me. While DiCaprio’s Pat starts the movie as this goofy but doe-eyed pawn in a bigger game, his shift to crotchety old man (while VERY funny), kind of overshadowed any character work that could have been done with his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). She’s largely reactive for the entire movie, being used as a MacGuffin for DiCaprio’s screwball chase antics or being told by an annoying one-note, boringly solemn Regina Hall character that she needs to trust the revolutionaries. DiCaprio and Infiniti only have a handful of scenes together, and Infiniti’s Willa is stuck most of the time just trying to escape her captors. She doesn’t get to show much personality before the action begins nor during it.

While Willa’s scenes with her prime kidnapper, Sean Penn’s Lockjaw, strive for pathos, that rang hollow for me amidst all of the fun the movie has with presenting Lockjaw as a complete idiot. Nothing he did ever scared me or made me worry for Willa, nor did I ever learn enough about Willa’s life pre-adventure to give stakes to her trying to escape. I barely learned anything about her other than her being fairly tough. There was nothing I wanted to see her get back to in her regular life as I didn’t find the character setup to be thoughtful whatsoever. We meet her friends, yes, and she goes after her dad for drinking and driving, but that’s five minutes of screentime and then she’s a football the rest of the movie, being thrown around from person to person and being chased by all. A football doesn’t have much personality.

Then there are the politics of it all. I voted for Harris, I don’t like Trump, I am sure those ICE detention centers can be hellish places. And yet, I did not feel a second of dread while watching this. Perhaps it was due to the breakneck pacing or the recurring comedy. Perhaps it’s because we never get to meet those characters being held in the ICE facilities. Or maybe this was because there is a serious lack of viscera in the movie’s action/suspense setpieces. I think it’s a compounding of it all. And it’s also probably due to some of the political dialogue here feeling like it was ripped straight out of buzz-word city. Like Anderson read too many Twitter posts and accidentally mistook those posts for the way people actually speak. This was very much the case during the beginning of the film, with Pat’s crew reveling in a ton of big, bold, and ultimately, for me, cheesy speechifying. It doesn’t help that [SPOILER] the movie ends with the hokiest Tom Petty needle drop that I have ever heard as DiCaprio’s daughter does this thing where she hears about a presumably dangerous protest on the radio and says something along the lines of, “Bye, Dad, I’m gonna go participate in this thing and probably get attacked by government thugs!” as American Girl plays and DiCaprio wishes her luck as if she’s going to the school play. What world does this last five minutes take place in? Surely not the same where they just spent a whole movie witnessing a fascist government do all they can to kill them both. It was stuff like this in important moments that made it so that this movie just did not hang together for me.

I will note, if this movie had maybe switched topics and decided to be a straight, non-thriller comedy about a dad looking for his daughter who ran away from home, it may have worked way more for me. I admire Anderson for going so political and understand/agree with a lot of what he’s going for, he just didn’t hit the sweet spot for me. But really, almost 100% of the comedy beats work here, including Benicio Del Toro continuing to make his case for best actor in Hollywood. And the Greenwood score, predictably, rocks—even though it is very much a thriller score for a movie I wasn’t thrilled by. But seriously, if the movie had been about Willa choosing to leave, we may have gotten to learn more about her and less about the ultimately kind of lame/inconsequential Sean Penn character. It could have been a straight comedy about Dad looking for his daughter, and both of them learning more about themselves than how to use guns, and I really think that would have worked. It would have had the chance to explore way more range for its main two characters.

Then the action. I think of Anderson as a great maker of still, striking images—a painter. I think of someone like Spielberg as more of the engineer, stringing together fast-moving, elaborate moments of whiz-bqng chemistry to create an organized piece of satisfying adrenaline. Sure enough, here, with PTA in the director’s seat, I just never felt that feeling that makes you grip your chair, hold your breath, or smile in awe of the action onscreen. That’s just not Anderson’s bag. Instead, it was all perfectly capable in its cinematography and oddly low on dynamic sequencing for a movie about a war.

I’m not saying I needed this to be John Wick, but for as much long, methodical chasing happens in this movie, none of it is paid off very handsomely at all. It’s cut very standardly, without enough of those oners and without enough bubbly blocking tricks to create true propulsion. You want that rollercoaster feeling in a movie like this—and despite the final car chase going up and down and up and down along an inherently very cinematic highway, One Battle never achieved the battle-highs I think of when I think of my favorite thrillers and actioners.

(4/10)