| There’s a line from one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s earlier movies, Revolutionary Road, that I love and was reminded of during this movie. “I can never remember, are you the young Wheelers on Revolutionary Road, or the young revolutionaries on Wheeler Road?” And for the sake of One Battle After Another, it is indeed the young revolutionaries. Revolutionaries who fought the man, committed crimes, had a baby and grew up. | | 2025
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Screenplay by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Infiniti Chase, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn
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Easily the most entertaining movie of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career and the most entertaining movie of 2025, One Battle After Another is part epic, part action movie, non-stop thrill ride about a pair of rebels who are a part of the fictional group the French 75, and the law enforcement officer who stayed on their tail for seventeen years.
Approximately every two years, Leonardo DiCaprio makes another movie to remind everyone that he’s one of the best actors on the planet. I don’t know why that’s such a forgettable fact, but possibly because the character of Bob Ferguson might just seep in the fabric of society and won’t necessarily be equated with DiCaprio who easily turns in his funniest performance yet. This is a high-stakes, politically-driven action movie from Paul Thomas Anderson and it is correctly being described as hilarious. However it should be easy to see why and how this movie is as funny as it is.
He starts out as a young thirty-ish rebel. Long hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, Rocketman is the most popular guy in their group. He can blend in with the suits, create bombs and other tech devices and he also falls in love with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and when she becomes pregnant with their child, one changes who they are and the other does not.
DiCaprio’s Rocketman becomes Bob Ferguson, a teenage girl dad now living in a small refuge town in the northwest. Specifically, a paranoid, middle-aged girl dad who has taught his daughter to trust no one except anyone who says nonsequitor French 75 code words. After teaching his daughter paranoia and living off the grid, he then spends his days in a housecoat, his long hair in a messy ponytail, drinking and smoking weed. So much alcohol and weed that he doesn’t remember the French 75 phrases that he was going to need in case law enforcement ends up coming after him. Which it now has, in the form of a racist, bigoted white supremacist played by Sean Penn.
The action is exhilarating, the comedy is hilarious, and the humanity of it all – the evolution of DiCaprio’s character, his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) who was mostly raised as a normal teenage girl by a paranoid middle-aged dad and now has to fight for her life, and the fact that the law enforcement officer out for revenge represents very real people who are a problem precisely because their aborrhent views has earned them powerful roles within the US government, military and police forces.
One Battle After Another doesn’t necessarily say as much as it looks like it’s going to say, but audiences aren’t going to have much breath left after the two-and-a-half-our entertaining thrill ride that this move turns into.
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