One Battle is primarily a film about race. The French 75 is largely Black: Beyond Taylor’s Perfidia, operatives and allies are played Wood Harris, Regina Hall, Starletta DuPois, and the musicians Dijon and Junglepussy, among others. During his time as an active member, Bob was known as “Ghetto Pat,” and retains a penchant for calling people “homie”; when he and Perfidia are making out in the back of a sedan as it speeds away from the detention center, he’s goaded into saying just how much he loves “Black girls.” Lockjaw, who spent years lusting after Perfidia, is so ideologically committed to white supremacy that when he seeks initiation into the Adventurers, he plans to find and kill Willa for fear that she’s his daughter. The math here is clear: The fetishization of Black women spans the entire political spectrum, from those sincerely seeking Black liberation to those who would like to see Black people killed en masse.
But this observation is only a starting point. One Battle shows solidarity across lines of race and class, but also the friction inherent to those alliances. When, during the siege, Bob is taken in by his daughter’s martial arts instructor, Sensei Sergio (Benecio del Toro), the latter’s unflappability is played for laughs. But Sergio’s cool efficiency as he directs dozens of undocumented children to safety makes Bob’s panic over the whereabouts of his daughter, confirmed to be safe with people he trusts, seem at least a little solipsistic. Bob’s almost tearful lament, from later in the film, that he can’t properly do his daughter’s hair, is heartbreaking.
Elsewhere, characters wield whatever power race gives them—however uneasily. Lockjaw imprisons and murders people with impunity, but is made insecure around the Adventurers by the fact he’s been sexually fixated on those they, and he, have deemed impure. A monologue about Black power is fearfully made manifest by a gunshot in a bank robbery. And, in the wrenching sequence where Perfidia leaves Bob and Willa, she expresses disgust at the way white revolutionaries have to be coddled and carried along. It has the sting of truth—but is undercut by the sorrow Taylor masterfully layers below Perfidia’s rage.
We are, in fact, living in an age of “identity politics,” but in the sense that people are shunted into camps, jails, or coffins based on the color of their skin. And so it’s truly ingenious that one of One Battle’s tensest sequences sees a portable paternity test deployed in a chapel. The myopia required to derive true meaning from such a thing—barely more sophisticated than phrenology—is staggering. But it’s the logical endpoint of the belief that some people are chattel and others are entitled to use them as they please. Later, after Willa screams at Lockjaw about her mother (“She was a rat!”), he’s practically salivating when he responds: “She was a warrior.”
Infiniti is asked to play the put-upon daughter of a man-child father, a scared child, a phony among true believers, and eventually, a reluctant killer. She acquits herself unbelievably well. The adrenaline-soaked shriek she lets out after shooting and killing the IZOD-clad Adventurer who had been pursuing her in a superb highway chase sequence is nearly on par with Jena Malone’s yelp of joy that serves as the thesis at the end of Anderson’s Inherent Vice. DiCaprio, as the father who loves her more than anything but is aware of the limits of his use to her, has never been better.
A moment after that scream, Bob comes across the wreckage of the chase. When he sees Willa coiled behind a sign at the side of the road, he’s overcome with relief. But she can’t relax: she raises the pistol toward him and asks him to repeat back the code phrases. He doesn’t. Instead, he reasons: I’m your dad. The gun comes down. She believes him—he is.