ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
(15) 162mins
★★★★★
WHAT time is it? It is a question Leonardo DiCaprio’s stressed-out fugitive Bob Ferguson is asked over and over again in this black comedy.
Wearing a dressing gown and bad shades, Bob doesn’t have the answer because he’s too stoned to remember the code he was given by a left-wing terror group called the French 75.
But I can tell you that the time is absolutely right for One Battle After Another.
This is a political satire that skewers both the extreme right and the extreme left at a moment when both sides are to the fore in the real world in the United States.
The time is also well overdue for this piece of cinematic dynamite that will have you on the edge of your seat — from laughter or the high-octane action.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it is a work of genius that fuses the best elements of his films There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights.
It begins 16 years ago with Bob helping to free refugees at a US border crossing.
During the raid his girlfriend, the wonderfully named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), orders Sean Penn’s military officer Steven J Lockjaw to “get up” his private parts.
The French 75’s increasingly reckless terrorism ends in a thrilling chase and Bob needing to go into hiding with the baby daughter he shares with Perfidia.
Most of the story is set in the current time, with Lockjaw coming after Bob and his daughter Willa.
As things get wilder, the audience is introduced to a bunch of incredible characters, including members of the white supremecist Christmas Adventurers Club, gun-toting nuns and Benecio Del Toro’s always-cool martial arts instructor Sergio.
The serene Del Toro is a perfect comic foil for the frantic DiCaprio who spends a lot of time running around shouting “f, f, f***.”
In one of the standout screwball moments, Sergio keeps repeating “four” as Bob is reluctant to jump out of his moving car like “Tom Cruise”. It is just one of many quotable lines.
But the most memorable scene brings the movie’s various plots to a perfect, heart-racing conclusion.
All of the cast are outstanding, with DiCaprio and newcomer Chase Infiniti as Willa most likely to be nominated for awards.
If there is any justice this film will get one Oscar after another.
GRANT ROLLINGS
THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2
(15) 96mins
★★☆☆☆
DIRRECTED by Renny Harlin, this second instalment in the Strangers trilogy is a bafflingly incoherent mess.
It picks up right after the events of Chapter 1, but instead of expanding on Bryan Bertino’s original 2008 home-invasion nightmare, it devolves into a clumsy blend of borrowed horror tropes held together by a barely coherent backstory.
Chapter 2 follows the survivor, Maya (Madelaine Petsch), as she is relentlessly pursued by masked killers in a sleepy American town.
Despite her injuries, Maya must find the strength to stay alive and tell the tale.
Petsch is committed to the physical demands of the role, fighting a CGI boar in a bafflingly out-of-place sequence.
However, the film’s drawn-out and repetitive cat-and-mouse chases become truly unbearable.
Narratively, the film is all over the place lurching from home-invasion suspense to slasher to survival horror.
The only thing that prevents it becoming a total farce is Harlin’s occasional use of a few inspired jump scares.
As a middle chapter, this feels like a placeholder for the next film.
LINDA MARRIC
DEAD OF WINTER
(15) 98mins
★★★☆☆
IF you were casting for a Ramboesque heroine, Emma Thompson would not be the first name to spring to mind.
But in this rescue of a kidnap victim from a remote cabin thriller, it is the Love Actually actress displaying ingenious ways to survive.
Set in northern Minnesota in the US, Thompson’s Barb heads out in a snow storm to a lake that had a sentimental value to her recently deceased husband.
There she comes across a man who has tied up a young woman in his cellar.
Unable to go to get help, Barb vows to save the girl herself.
But the man is not her main concern, because it is a gun-toting woman played by Judy Greer who is the one with the least to lose by fighting to the bitter end.
Thompson is remarkably good when Barb is stitching up a bullet wound in her arm with fishing wire, and the attention to detail in the sets also impresses.
But choosing her isn’t enough to make this last- person-standing drama feel particularly original.
Like the tracks that Barb leaves in the snow, you know where most of the plot turns lead.
GRANT ROLLINGS
FILM NEWS
STEPHEN KING’s novella Rat is being turned into a movie.
MILLIE BOBBY BROWN is to play US gymnast Kerri Strug in biopic Perfect.
CHRISTIAN BALE and Jessie Buckley star in Undead Lovers, based on Frankenstein.
