One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another (2025)

95% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 376 reviews)

Runtime: This was way too darn long

Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Many famous faces that I wish were in something better

From: Warner Bros.

An unwelcome return of Contrarian Blair. It doesn’t happen that often but on occasion, I do have the unwelcome task of explaining why I did not like a motion picture that everyone else loves. As many eyes will be on this review, might as well mention the non sequitor that currently, there are more than 5,000 (!) accounts that follow me on Letterboxd. I’ll forever be amazed and flattered. Hopefully none are lost after this hot take…

Previous examples of outlier opinions include Mad Max: Fury Road, Mickey 17, that atrocious Suspiria remake from Luca Guadalcanal and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Battle isn’t as abominable as the new Suspiria or All at Once yet I was still floored it wasn’t even something I liked. For transparency’s sake and only mentioning some of his films I’ve checked out, Boogie Nights and There Will be Blood are masterpieces while Licorice Pizza is very good, questionable last 30 seconds aside.

Battle, though, totally missed the mark for me. I knew there was trouble right away; already, longtime readers should know what a major complaint was: vulgarity, especially the constant F-bombs. Not surprisingly, almost immediately I loathed the character w/ the preposterous name PERFIDIA BEVERLY HILLS; let me call her Perfidia Hills, because c’mon now. It’s horrible optics for a white man like me to say that I hated a Black woman character… then again, Ms. Hills was SUCH a garish stereotype that white nationalists (yes, some characters in the film fit that label) have of Black women, you might as well have had a white woman portraying the part as a blackface character!

I apologize for that comment sounding grossly offensive; I can explain why the comment is unfortunately accurate. In an early scene, she holds Sean Penn’s evil character at gunpoint and… wants him to HAVE A BONER for reasons unknown. I’m not exaggerating by saying that she was constantly uncouth and hyper-sexualized. The biggest bugaboo for me and this film: hating EVERY character. I only had slightly less disdain for Leo DiCaprio’s druggie alcoholic loser father. Benicio del Toro’s character was cool… until he I saw him slam down cans of Modelo beer while driving! Was that supposed to be an example of “humor?” I rarely laughed through the film.

By the way, I knew beforehand a character was bestowed the moniker Perfidia Beverly Hills; as goofy as that is, it doesn’t compare to Penn’s military Colonel character. He has the name STEVEN J. LOCKJAW; no lie. It’s as if he’s a Colonel in an MCU movie, that surname so preposterous & on the nose.

Was the message of the film “both the far-left and far-right are buffoons that deserved to be mocked?” I dunno, but I did not want to root for far-left terrorists, no matter the targets of their bombs or their ideology. As the focus is on Leo and his teen daughter, I don’t know what the point of it was; I do know that for the most part, I wasn’t entertained in the slightest. Penn’s character had a funny haircut and even funnier walk; otherwise… what a heavy-handed, dunderheaded look at serious topics such as immigration, “illegal aliens” and the response to protests, a movie about people of color where the lead is a dumb white guy.

All that said, a few compliments can still be given. The movie was shot in VistaVision-it does look nice & they filmed in some scenic locations. Even if may not always fit what’s on screen, I liked Jonny Greenwood’s score. It was nice seeing an actor from Road House for one scene. The reference to Gil Scott-Heron was a pleasant surprise; who knows how many of “the youth” understood it… allegedly that song played during the end credits after American Girl. I left as soon as I could after that overlong movie finally concluded!

Unlike those “popular pictures” that I loathe, at least I can comprehend why people like Battle… its politics and the director. I’m glad most people love the film (and even the crowd at the screening yesterday seemed far more into it than myself)—if only I could share in the love for One Battle After Another.