Thriller
One Battle After Another (15)
Review: Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the most critically acclaimed filmmakers working today. Seven of his nine feature films have been lavished with multiple Oscar nominations, including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza. He has personally accrued eight nominations for his direction and screenwriting, but is yet to claim a coveted golden statuette for impeccable work behind the camera.
That losing streak is likely to change with One Battle After Another, a consummately choreographed action thriller loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland about a ragtag group of activists fighting oppression. Anderson assembles an impressive ensemble cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio as a paranoid, stoner ex-revolutionary who cannot recall the correct response to the code-worded question “What time is it?”
In one of the funniest scenes, his dishevelled hero – clad in a dressing down – berates the person posing the security prompt and demands they afford him leniency because his brain is fried. The joke overstays its welcome, one of a few minor niggles that prevent Anderson’s madcap jaunt from flirting with perfection. Virtuoso sequences conceived with cinematographer Michael Bauman include a rooftop escape that culminates in a literal fall from grace and a visually stunning car chase conducted on hypnotically undulating roads. Jonny Greenwood’s nerve-jangling score ramps up the intensity.
Members of the French 75 radical group led by firebrand Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) stage a daring raid on the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, located close to the Mexican border. Perfidia celebrates in the bed of comrade Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio). Grizzled US Army Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (Sean Penn) is entrusted with neutralising the revolutionaries and he nurtures an erotically charged fixation with Perfidia.
Sixteen years later, Bob and teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) are living off the grid when they are targeted by Lockjaw, who is seeking membership of a covert white nationalist movement called the Christmas Adventurers Club. Bob haphazardly rediscovers his revolutionary past, aided by martial arts sensei Sergio St Carlos (Benicio del Toro) and former French 75 associate Deandra (Regina Hall).
One Battle After Another is a politically charged reflection of contemporary concerns, which makes impressively light work of an ambitious 162-minute running time. Coolly assured in its technical execution, Anderson’s picture entertains, enthrals and provokes timely debate about immigrant scapegoating. There are lulls in the opening chapter but the twisted central love triangle gains dramatic momentum as sins of the past are revisited upon Bob and his compatriots. DiCaprio dials into the offbeat humour of his misfit’s life-or-death situation and Taylor makes an indelible impact with limited screen time. Penn’s scowling, emotionally pent up antagonist unravels with masterful precision. There will be blood spattered across his downfall.
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Horror
The Strangers: Chapter 2 (15)
Review: Imagine paying for a three-course meal and waiting around a year for each course to arrive at the table. That’s the time-gated feast destined for audiences who savour this triptych of slasher horrors sketching the origins of the merciless killers first glimpsed in the 2008 home invasion thriller The Strangers. These masked menaces randomly select victims by knocking on a front door and asking unsuspecting residents if Tamara is home.
In Chapter 1 of Renny Harlin’s unholy origin trilogy, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and fiance Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) spent a night in a cabin in the woods of Oregon and blood-crazed killers Dollface, Man In The Mask and Pin-Up Girl broke into their rustic accommodation and terrorised the couple. Maya’s harrowing ordeal continues in Chapter 2, a light snack before the meaty main of Chapter 3 next year, which should serve up her much abused heroine’s vengeful retribution bloody and rare.
In the meantime, returning director Harlin and screenwriters Alan R Cohen and Alan Freedland cook up a couple of stylish but predictably flavoured set-pieces inside a hospital and outdoors in rain-lashed woods where a bizarre wild animal attack recalls Leonardo DiCaprio’s life-or-death tussle with a bear in The Revenant. Common sense goes walkabout in the middle instalment. A prolonged sequence in a morgue would be physically impossible as depicted on screen considering Maya has stitches in her abdomen that we are constantly reminded will tear if she overexerts. She does, repeatedly.
Maya (Petsch) recuperates from her hellish ordeal in Venus County Hospital, where she learns Ryan’s tragic fate and wrestles with survivor’s guilt during a bedside interrogation by Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake) and Deputy Walters (Pedro Leandro). Screams echo around the hospital and Maya discovers she is trapped on her ward with her tormentors, who intend to finish the torture and slaughter they started back at the cabin.
Unsure who she can trust, Maya considers breaking for cover to seek refuge with attending nurse Danica (Brooke Lena Johnson) and her housemates Annie (Sara Freedland), Gregory (Gabriel Basso) and Neil (Pablo Sandstrom). However, every act of kindness is potentially a trap, designed to lower Maya’s defences.
The Strangers: Chapter 2 will only be of interest to fans who intend to devour all of Harlin’s set meal because this gruesome game of cat and mouse requires context to make sense. Occasional flashbacks to the opening chapter, released in May 2024 in the UK and Ireland, paper over memory lapses and recycle cheap jump scares. The single figure on-screen body count won’t induce any sleepless nights. Petsch is wholeheartedly committed to her role and wrings torrents of genuine tears as she seeks an escape from a close-knit town where everyone seems to be in cahoots.
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