by Hudson Moura
“Free borders, free bodies, free choices, free fucking fear!” Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) spits at Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) early on, staking the film’s terrain with an unambiguous anti-fascist charge. In its first movement, One Battle After Another is a clenched political thriller: Perfidia and her partner Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) lead a revolutionary cell intent on liberating migrants detained by ICE; Lockjaw, a career officer who later aligns with a clandestine supremacist network, vows to make their capture his life’s work, marching under the chilling motto “Keep the world safe and pure.” The opening is tight, propulsive, and bracingly timely—an insurgent reply to state violence pitched at the volatile edge of American now.
Anderson’s control of tone is formidable. Action set-pieces—particularly the chase sequences—mesh suspense, momentum, and spatial clarity without surrendering the political line of sight. The soundscape functions as an extra-diegetic narrator: an imposing, interventionist score that doesn’t merely underscore mood but actively comments on it, counterpointing images and nudging interpretation. Taylor’s presence is electric; Perfidia is written and played as a figure who compresses lineage, sensuality, and force into a single vector of refusal. The film’s time jump—Perfidia escapes to Mexico while Bob disappears with their infant daughter—reopens the story sixteen years later with Willa (their child), now in high school and karate, living under the long shadow of state pursuit. Military comms rename Bob and Willa “Baby Charlene” and “Rocketman,” a dehumanizing code that crystallizes the film’s critique of supremacist bureaucracies.
Yet the architecture that begins as a political thesis gradually reorients toward a character chase. In the back half, the macro-argument (institutions that police borders to preserve racialized purity) recedes, replaced by a manhunt whose primary fuel is Lockjaw’s obsession and the family’s flight. The result is not a collapse but a drift: set-pieces stay impressive, the score keeps biting, but the discourse thins. What had been a study of organized power—its creeds, its networks, its self-justifying myths—narrows into the psychology of pursuit. The villains’ ideology ossifies into slogans; the revolutionaries’ project contracts to survival. Anderson, long admired for epics in which character arcs and social systems coil together, here allows the coil to loosen: less dialectic, more pursuit; less political capital, more spectacle.
This shift has consequences. Perfidia’s founding declaration promises a battle over structures—borders, carceral practice, supremacist governance—yet by the final movement the film is staging a battle over bodies in motion. Lockjaw’s secret-society ties raise the stakes but rarely deepen the argument; their credo is clear, their operations efficient, their threat unmistakable—what’s underdeveloped is the counter-vision beyond the family’s preservation. Bob and Willa’s bond supplies feeling but not strategy; the revolution’s collective disappears into the margins, leaving Perfidia’s exile and Willa’s training to shoulder the thematic load alone. The film begins like Civil War by way of border politics and ends closer to a prestige chase picture—gripping, yes, but more conventional than its first act promises.
Still, Anderson’s craft keeps the frame alive. He stages violence without pornographizing it and finds frictions in small choices: how radio chatter names its targets; how a motto travels from briefing room to street; how a daughter rehearses agency in a dojo while the state rehearses domination in war games. When the film remembers to counterpose Perfidia’s exilic resourcefulness against Lockjaw’s bureaucratized zeal, its critique lands with force. When it forgets, the chase—however expertly composed—plays as a genre reflex.
Teyana Taylor is on fire—electrifying in every frame she’s given—which makes it all the more regrettable that the film’s most compelling character and performance exit the narrative so early. The title, One Battle After Another, proves uncannily apt: it names not only the film’s structure (from the opening insurgency to the closing pursuit) but also its political horizon—suggesting, especially in the first movement and again in the final beats, that struggle persists and hope endures. The film closes on a tempered uplift: the fight for a more egalitarian, fair world continues, even if the real bandits—the far-right, moneyed supremacist elite—too often move through the frame unperceived and unharmed. 
(3.8/5)