SPOILER-FREE PLOT SUMMARY
The extremist group French 75 is attempting to spark a revolution against the oppressive establishment that is the United States government. Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor), a key member of the group, is involved with fellow member Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the two help lead various uprisings and violent demonstrations. But, when the group raids a border detention center to free prisoners, Perfidia meets Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and they start a sexual relationship. This comes into play later when Lockjaw gets an exclusive invite to an Aryan race club known as the Christmas Adventurers who, among other criteria, have to pledge that they’ve never had experience with “unpure” relationships. Meanwhile, Parfidia walks out on Pat and their months-old daughter in the name of the revolution, leading to her eventual arrest and the scattering of the remaining French 75 members. After a decade and a half in hiding, Pat is a paranoid single father going by the name of Bob Ferguson and Lockjaw sets out to find the now teenage Willa (Chase Infinity) in order to possibly clean up a loose end.
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
For months now, we’ve seen the trailer online, on TV and in the theater. But we still had no idea what it was. Was it a comedy? What’s the setting? Why was DiCaprio’s character going to see a martial arts sensei? In a world where, far too often, trailers give away the whole movie in a desperate attempt to pique the audience’s interest, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER seemed to do the opposite. It didn’t give the audience enough for their interest to be piqued.
This is marketed as an “action thriller” so maybe the intention was meant for the vagueness to create some mystery in order to compliment the plot. Unfortunately, there’s only one true “plot twist” and it’s pretty predictable right from the beginning.
DiCaprio is stellar (per usual), Taylor is believable as a conflicted revolutionary and Infinity — in her big screen debut — is a nice surprise. Penn, on the other hand, is a cartoonish caricature of an old stereotype and del Toro’s immense talent is wasted in his limited screen time. The only reason to not give that part to an up-and-coming actor is so they can use his name in the marketing.
While most of the performances are as stellar as you’d expect, the story is nothing more than low hanging fruit. The best political films are commentaries on American life. EDDINGTON earlier this year, for example. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is closer to a pandering agenda movie than it is a commentary.
Put another way, it doesn’t take too much creativity to take the extreme stereotypes of “old conservative white guys” and the extreme stereotypes of “liberal ideologists” — throwing in some current political hot button topics like ICE and immigration — to create a script and rely on a highly decorated cast to carry the project.
As we’ve talked about on the podcast many times, even if I agree with your agenda, I will resist when being preached at. Unfortunately, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is about two and a half hours of pure resisting. I suspect all the people raving about this movie are simply experiencing confirmation bias.
All politics aside, there’s not enough action, not enough comedy, not enough intrigue and not enough momentum to make up for the lack of any of those things. I was promised an Oscar-caliber movie but what I got was a slow, boring, uninteresting, predictable marathon with a lazy story.
JKG SCORE: 5.5
Untitled Film Project 