One Battle After Another (2025)

I booked the cinema tickets for the car chase. Let me be upfront about that. Word was going around that One Battle After Another had this incredible, unmissable chase sequence, and I am, without apology, a car chase guy. If you sell me on a great chase, I'll be there. So when that sequence finally arrived, stretching across a flat desert highway with no turns, no surprises, and precious little in the way of stakes, I won't pretend I wasn't deflated. More monotonous than thrilling. A genuine missed opportunity buried in a film that, frustratingly, had all the ingredients to make it sing.

And here's the thing: I don't think One Battle After Another is a bad film. Not remotely. But I've watched the five-star reviews pile up, and I can't quite get there myself. Four stars, yes. A masterpiece? No.

What it absolutely is, though, is a film that wears its influences proudly and pulls most of them off. This is a crime thriller made in the spirit of 70s character-driven cinema, shot on actual film, and you feel it from the first frame. The grain is there, the natural lighting is there, the long unhurried takes that let you sit inside a landscape or study the exhaustion on a face. It's a deliberate, considered aesthetic choice, and it mostly works. There's a rawness to the images that a digitally clean production would never have achieved, and the film is genuinely beautiful to look at for long stretches at a time.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn are, as expected, the engine of the whole thing. DiCaprio does what he does best: he makes moral ambiguity feel lived-in. You believe this is a man caught between loyalty and survival, not because the script spells it out, but because of what he does with his eyes, his stillness, the way tension lives in his body. Penn, meanwhile, struts into his role with quiet menace and the kind of weathered gravity that only comes from someone who genuinely doesn't care whether you like him. Both are phenomenal, full stop. I've followed DiCaprio's career through films like Blood Diamond and had a great time watching him operate at his best, and he's operating near that level here.

Where the film wobbles, beyond that deflating chase, is in its soundtrack and its pacing. The score does something genuinely impressive in places, building a low ambient tension that pulls you further into the mood. But then, just as often, it misjudges the room entirely, barging into a scene that needed silence, feeling intrusive rather than immersive. It's the kind of inconsistency that suggests a film that wasn't quite finished being wrestled into shape.

And pace is a real issue. The film promises something relentless. The marketing, the early buzz, the tone of the opening act, all of it suggested a pressure-cooker thriller that would tighten its grip over two hours until you could barely breathe. What it actually delivers is something moodier, slower, more interested in atmosphere than momentum. I don't always object to that trade. But when you've set up a particular expectation and then fail to meet it, the disappointment lands harder than it should.

That's the real problem here. Sky-high expectations, genuinely impressive craft, and a handful of baffling choices that stop it becoming the thing it clearly wants to be. It's moody, well-acted, and visually arresting. The performances alone are worth your time and your ticket money. But the narrative urgency isn't quite there, the set-pieces don't deliver on their promise, and I walked out of the cinema feeling like I'd seen a very good film that had been oversold as an all-timer.

Four stars. Solid. Worth seeing, especially on the biggest screen you can find, because it is gorgeous to look at. But not the masterpiece we were sold. Not even close.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2025  | Watched: 2025-09-27

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · Sky Go · Now TV Cinema · HBO Max
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · HBO Max Amazon Channel · HBO Max · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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