ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER **1/2
Paul Thomas Anderson2025
IDEA: A burned-out former revolutionary tries to protect his daughter when his old nemesis mobilizes his forces to track her down.
BLURB: It’s perhaps inevitable that a Hollywood film about a cell of revolutionaries would be, well, less than revolutionary. But it’s ironic that such a film should be the most prosaic work yet from Paul Thomas Anderson. In a filmography replete with richly drawn, idiosyncratic characters, unorthodox plotting and tone, and a tactile sense for era-specific milieux, One Battle After Another can’t help but feel conventional, hewing to generic structure and tropes at the expense of spontaneity or depth. So we get the opening heist montage that obliquely introduces the main players; the stickup gone wrong; the flash-forward to a life in abeyance after the fallout; and the call to action in a cat-and-mouse thriller that you know the ending to at least an hour before the 162-minute film concludes. To be fair, Anderson executes all of this with the formal command and energy one expects from him, if not consistently the visual panache. And One Battle After Another is certainly enriched by its political content, however unsubtle, excoriating the deathless twinned American evils of military fascism and white nationalism. The ideology may be impossible to argue with, but it doesn’t exactly make for the most thought-provoking cinema, especially when it’s embodied by characters who are more schematic types than psychologically nuanced people you can engage with. If the final result is solid but perhaps too easily digestible — action-packed, emotionally cathartic — maybe it’s okay if it means stirring some desperately needed revolutionary fervor in the proletariat.
