By Samantha Ofole-Prince
From Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor to Benicio Del Toro, “One Battle After Another” is an explosive drama which features a star-studded cast.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson has filled this 3-hour ensemble, which follows a group of ex-revolutionaries on a rescue mission, with several well-known faces.
Elaborately paced, this big-budget drama follows Bob (DiCaprio), a former explosives expert for a revolutionary group called The French 75, led by his girlfriend Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) who commits an atrocious act. Now in hiding with his teen daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) and surviving off-grid, Bob’s life unravels when a former enemy, Captain Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), resurfaces after 16 years and Willa goes missing.
A political satire, a father daughter drama, “One Battle After Another” opens with a left-wing organization, The French 75 executing a raid on a detention camp along the U.S.-Mexico Border to free immigrants who lack permanent legal status, a mission which sets off a chain of events that reaches its culmination several decades later.
“You have an incredibly flawed protagonist and unexpected choices,” shares DiCaprio. “It’s a father disconnecting with his daughter. She’s of a different generation; he’s completely disconnected from her. He’s a disaster of a father, and then all of a sudden he’s put into this wild circumstance to try to save her.”
“It took a lot of conversation between me and Paul to build Perfidia’s layers and create this color palette,” adds Taylor, who plays a badass revolutionary outlaw. “And I love the name Perfidia. We don’t always agree with the things that she does, but we see a woman in survival mode and that’s how I like to work when I’m diving into a character, creating those layers and color palettes, because then they make it easier to tap into something. I think in the theater when you’re watching it, you get to laugh with us, you get to cry with us, you get to feel with us. It’s very raw, and I hope that this movie really creates a lot of healthy dialogue, and a lot of necessary conversations that need to be had.”
A film sure to snag several Oscar nominations this award season, “One Battle After Another “opens in theaters September 26.
Samantha Ofole-Prince is a U.S. based journalist and movie critic who covers industry-specific news that includes television and film.
Photos: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Pictures
