Not on the Best of 2025 List: One Battle After Another

Huh? What? This? Really?

Once again, I am baffled by the response to a popular year-end movie. But this time, it isn’t like Everything Everywhere All at Once. In that case I said, “Well, I don’t get this, but I can see why, if I did, I might think it was really awesome.” One Battle After Another is not a case of me not getting the movie. I get it. I just found it really lackluster and off-putting.

This movie is way too bland and way too long, with a big nothing of a performance from DiCaprio. I had read going in that this movie had one of the great car chase scenes of all time. So blah. It was nothing.

The biggest problem with this movie is tone. Every performance feels like it’s in a different movie. We start with Teyana Taylor, who has apparently been told she’s in a Roger Corman or Russ Meyer movie (“This revolutionary is one red hot mama who’ll get you hard before she takes you down!”) Then you get DiCaprio doing a dinner-theater Big Lebowski and I just can’t reconcile the two. Sean Penn and Benecio Del Toro are both fine, but again, don’t feel like they’re in the same movie, and it’s hardly the best performance either has given (Del Toro is so much better in this year’s The Phoenician Scheme)  Chase Inifiniti seems like a promising newcomer if you put her in a better movie. 

Longtime readers of my year-end lists will remember that I loved The Master and Licorice Pizza (and of course I loved many of his early films) but I don’t love every Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and this definitely seemed to me to be one of his duds.

I suppose if I had to take a lesson from this movie, it’s that anyone can do an American remake of a great foreign film without securing the rights, if you just change and update enough elements. The basic premise here seems to be: “Remember how great The Battle of Algiers was? What if we did an American remake, except in this version, everybody sucks? (And it’s kind of a comedy except not really.)” My answer to that question is, “I’m not interested,” but this movie has been a great success with critics and many moviegoers, so I guess that it was a good idea to base a movie around that question. Find another great old movie and do the same!