Action dramas usually treat loyalty like a brand slogan. You pick a side, you ride for that side, anyone who wavers ends up in a slow motion betrayal shot. One Battle After Another starts with that familiar language of cause and comrades, but it keeps twisting the idea until loyalty looks stranger, more fragile, and a lot more human.
Paul Thomas Anderson sets it all up with a simple premise. Pat “Ghetto Pat” Calhoun, later known as Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), is a former revolutionary whose past with the radical French 75 keeps crashing into his present life with his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). A corrupt military officer, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), will not let them go, and every chase, raid and rescue turns into a test of who or what each character truly serves.
Loyalty as Something People Negotiate, Not Swear Forever
From the first prison break at Otay Mesa, the French 75 look like the usual loyal guerrilla cell. They risk their lives together, they chant, they move with that almost choreographed confidence. Underneath that, the film plants all these small fractures. Pat wants to build a family. Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) wants to keep escalating the revolution. The goals match for a while, then they split.
What the film does differently is refuse to treat those splits as simple cowardice. Perfidia gives up her comrades to Lockjaw to avoid prison, which is a clear betrayal. It is also a choice made under crushing pressure, after years of violence and burnout. Pat steps away from the movement to raise Charlene as Willa in hiding, and the movie treats that as its own kind of loyalty, one that favors one child over a collective dream.
The French 75 and the Cost of Staying True
The French 75 survivors who show up later in Baktan Cross have paid for their loyalty in blood and exile. Lockjaw hunts them down, often literally shooting them on sight after Perfidia’s deal leads him to their safe houses. By the time the story returns to them, what is left is a patchwork network of sanctuary cities, safe convents and underground clinics.
They are still loyal to the idea of resistance, but they are also older and tired. You can feel it in the way they look at Bob, who has drifted into addiction and paranoia. They cared enough to help hide him for years. They also resent the way his secrecy and unreliability put their newer recruits at risk.
Family Loyalty That Keeps Changing Shape
The emotional core of the film is the strange, jagged bond between Bob and Willa. Bob believes he is being loyal to his daughter by keeping her in the dark, moving her around, and treating every new town like a temporary bunker. Willa reads all of that as abandonment dressed up as protection.
When she discovers that her biological father is actually Lockjaw, the man hunting them, and that her mother Perfidia traded her comrades for immunity, every definition of loyalty in her life explodes at once. In a more conventional action drama, this would cue a quick moment of angst and then a reaffirmed father daughter hug. One Battle After Another lets her stay furious and suspicious, gun in hand, while she works out who deserves her trust going forward.
Lockjaw and the Loyalty of Cowards
Lockjaw looks like the usual action villain at first glance. Decorated officer, ruthless, a face you can easily imagine on recruitment posters. The more time the film spends with him, the more he turns into a case study in warped loyalty.
He claims loyalty to the United States, to order, to the secretive Christmas Adventurers Club that treats violent reactionary politics like a Christmas themed lodge activity. In reality, his primary loyalty is to his own status. He covers up Perfidia’s actions when he wants her, then uses her as a bargaining chip when that serves his career.
The Side Characters Who Complicate Everything
What really makes the film’s portrait of loyalty feel different is how much work the side characters do. Sergio St Carlos (Benicio del Toro), Willa’s karate teacher, is loyal to the movement in a way Bob envies. He still trains kids, still drives toward danger when Baktan Cross comes under attack, still risks his life to smuggle Bob to safety. That loyalty costs him dearly, and the film does not pretend otherwise.
Then there is Avanti, the bounty hunter who takes Willa to a far right militia with every intention of handing her over, then changes his mind and dies helping her escape. In most action thrillers, a guy like that stays a clean antagonist or flips in a big, corny speech. Here, his pivot feels small and human. The loyalty that wins in that moment is not to a flag or a club, it is to the basic idea that killing a teenager for a paycheck is a line he will not cross.
Why It Hits Differently in the Current Action Landscape
Part of why all of this stands out is timing. Action cinema right now is full of shared universes and franchise loyalty, where characters pledge allegiance to teams or brands, then spend several films proving how ride or die they are. Early awards chatter has One Battle After Another sitting alongside those movies at the box office and on awards lists, but tonally it is doing something else.
The film treats loyalty as a question, not an answer. It asks who benefits when you stay loyal to a cause that no longer seems to love you back and what happens to kids who inherit their parents’ half resolved promises. It asks how much loyalty any individual owes to institutions that have proven willing to discard them.
One Battle After Another suggests that loyalty is valuable precisely because it should never be automatic. The characters who survive with their souls mostly intact are the ones who learn when to stay, when to walk away, and when to build something new. That kind of loyalty, tested and chosen again in every battle, feels a lot more interesting than any slogan.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.