My warning before you see Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another is in cinemas now, so what can people expect? (Picture: Warner Bros.)

Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film is out in cinemas this week, and if you believe the hype it’s the best movie of the year, if not the decade.

Breathless critics, journalists and influencers granted preview access have been fawning over One Battle After Another for weeks, calling it ‘a sublime masterpiece’, ‘a slam-dunk’ and ‘a stone-cold, instant classic’.

It’s also been bombarded with five-star reviews by everyone from the BBC to the Guardian, to Time Out, the Telegraph, the Independent and Metro too.

In a year of strong releases, but perhaps one lacking such an obvious knock-out contender for awards season like Oppenheimer was in 2023, it feels like Sinners was the last time film fans were as excited in the past 12 months.

But even that fantastically stylish and original take on a vampire horror flick didn’t get people frothing at the mouth with excitement quite like filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest has – or as liberal with the full-mark reactions.

It’s even broken a record, becoming the highest-rated of his films so far on Rotten Tomatoes, with One Battle After Another rated at a stonking 98% according to critics on the review aggregator site.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor star in Paul Thomas Anderson’s bold new film which has been heralded as a ‘masterpiece’ (Picture: Warner Bros.)

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His breakout film Boogie Nights from 1997 comes next, joint with both 2007 classic There Will Be Blood and 2017’s Phantom Thread, all on 91% – and all considered great in their own right.

Everything I enjoyed about One Battle After Another

But for me, One Battle After Another is not the film of the year – and the hype kind of ruined it.

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Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it’s a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. I still absolutely recommend it – just with the suggestion that maybe everyone should calm down a bit.

DiCaprio, who has never knowingly turned in anything less than an excellent performance, is on top form as a hapless ex-revolutionary who’s smoked so much weed over the years that he’s incapable of doing much more than sitting on the sofa watching old films via his VHS player.

The movie is part thriller, part satire, part black comedy, part action film (Picture: Warner Bros.) While it’s great – including Chase Infiniti’s debut film performance as DiCaprio’s daughter (pictured) – I don’t think it lives up to the insane hype (Picture: Warner Bros.)

His character Bob is pathetic, but we still cheer for him when he has any kind of breakthrough on his frantic journey to try and rescue his missing daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) – beginning with the monumental struggle to remember one of the passwords on the phone that will unlock communications properly with his old far-left outfit, the French 75.

DiCaprio gets to demonstrate his exquisite knack for playing frustration as well as exercise his funny bone in One Battle After Another, which is at once both a timely political thriller and brutal black comedy.

I have no problem with this jarring but exhilarating mash-up of genres at all; I can certainly get onboard with other critics praising it as a refreshing, out-of-pocket style of film. Why should movies play by the rules of strict genre?

For its wild swings between the ridiculous and the vicious, it probably feels closest to what this would be like in real life, if we too had a deranged white-supremacist detention centre commanding officer after us (Sean Penn). And on that note, Penn also gives an extraordinary performance as Col. Steven Lockjaw, a crop-haired, gurning psychopath who is truly a cinematic villain for the ages.

Be prepared: it’s a scarily timely movie Sean Penn’s maniac baddie Lockjaw represents the extreme right in the movie (Picture: Warner Bros.)

I also commend the film for its eerie timeliness, as Anderson examines opposing political and social views at the furthest of each end of the spectrum, a situation which it appears more and more of us are being pushed towards.

‘It deals with extremism on both sides and the polarity of the world that we live in where no one can seem to communicate or get along,’ DiCaprio told me and other press at the film’s London premiere.

‘This is a political thriller, but I don’t think [Anderson’s] imposing his ideology on the audience – he’s holding up a mirror to who we are. And he wrote this 20 years ago, which is absolutely fascinating that it’s coming out at this particular time in our world’s history.’

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Previous Page Next Page One Battle After Another is not the film of the decade

But there are cracks in the plot that haven’t, in my opinion, been sufficiently papered over.

Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, Willa’s karate teacher, is somewhat randomly inserted into the chaos, with his own sideline in helping undocumented immigrants left under-explored as he tries to help Bob. His character feels a bit more plot device than the second half of a great onscreen double act that the trailer promises.

Some characters seem underserved in One Battle After Another, including Taylor’s beautifully-named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Picture: Warner Bros.) Benicio del Toro doesn’t get the onscreen double act I hoped with DiCaprio (Picture: Warner Bros.)

By dint of the story’s structure (no spoilers here), we see less of Teyana Taylor’s firecracker revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills than you might hope, as well as other underwritten members of the French 75 like Regina Hall’s Deandra.

One Battle After Another also still has a beefy running time of 162 minutes, which, while it is remarkably well-paced for that length of time, does not fly by like it’s 90 minutes as some gushing fans have insisted.

It may also take you up to an hour to fully lock in with the movie and Anderson’s vision after a bit of a slow start, if you have the patience – but I will say that, despite its drawn out ending, One Battle After Another provides one of the best and most enthralling movie climaxes in a long while thanks to a mesmerising car chase and a few surprises along the way.

So far be it from me to discourage you from going to the cinema this weekend to see One Battle After Another – in fact, I really hope that you do! But I also hope you can enjoy it more without the sky-high expectations of it being ‘undoubtedly not only the film of the year, but for an entire generation, perhaps the entire decade’.

Because while it’s a true original and a good film – it’s not that.

One Battle After Another is in cinemas from today.

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