Teyana Taylor | Bouquets & Brickbats

20/01/26

Netflix

It’s what’s known as ‘The Netflix Effect”: a movie that was originally conceived and filmed to be watched on a giant screen, which – through no fault of its own – ends up on a much smaller one. Joe Carnahan’s The Rip features plenty of action sequences filmed in dark corners and on gloomy rain-drenched streets. Even when projected onto the big-ish B&B home-viewing screen, I occasionally find myself struggling to establish who is shooting/stabbing/punching whom. A shame, because I’m convinced that in a movie theatre, this would easily have made it into four-star territory.

Welcome to Florida, where the cops appear to be every bit as ruthless and foul-mouthed as the drug dealers they repeatedly find themselves up against. After the brutal murder of Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) of the Miami-Dade Police Department, suspicion falls upon members of her special unit, the Tactical Narcotics Team. The FBI are brought in to question them, but find themselves drawing a blank. The team’s leader, Lieutenant Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), and his bestie, Sergeant JD Byrne (Ben Affleck), are bewildered. Who could have killed Jackie? (Byrne has particular reason to be cut-up about it as the two of them were in a serious relationship.) Could it really be that somebody on the team murdered her?

Then an anonymous tip-off comes in. A house in Hialeah contains hidden drug money, belonging to a local cartel. Dumars and JD head out there with their regular team in support: Detectives Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor) and Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno), the latter with her trusty dog in tow, trained to sniff out not drugs, but dough. (Hmm. Where can I get a dog like that?) When said pooch becomess very excited, Dumars convinces the current tenant, Desi Molina (Sasha Calle), to let the team in to her late Grandmother’s house, whereupon they do find an eye-watering sum in used notes. It’s the kind of haul that could change their lives forever.

But it soon becomes apparent that certain unidentified others know all about that hidden stash – and are determined to get their hands on it by any means possible…

Okay, so it’s essentially another version of The Pardoner’s Tale, but Carnahan’s twisty script, co-written with Michael McGrale, is a clever mix of whodunnit and taut action adventure. The former element keeps me guessing for the film’s first two thirds – some of the reveals are genuinely surprising – while the final section flings me headlong into a breathless chase. It’s here where the aforementioned Netflix Effect begins to take its toll.

Damon and Affleck demonstrate the kind of chemistry they’ve had ever since Good Will Hunting, and the supporting players all make the most of the screen-time they’re afforded – though it’s probably true to say that the female actors are somewhat sidelined in what feels increasingly like a big boys punch em’ up. But if action is what you’ve been craving, you’ll find it here by the bucket load.

Those who persist in watching movies on their iPhones should probably quit while they’re ahead.

3.5 stars

Philip Caveney

04/10/25

Cineworld, Edinburgh

We’re uncharacteristically late to this one, mostly because in its week of release we are in a camper-van in the wilds of Scotland and no cinema in that vicinity is showing it. Not complaining, you understand, people need to have holidays, but this is a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, whom I’ve held in special esteem ever since watching Boogie Nights way back in 1997. And all those ‘best film of the year’ reports make me impatient to get back to civilisation.

Mind you, I’d be the first to admit that, in recent years, PTA has (at least for me) gone off the boil a bit. Unlike many of his followers, I didn’t really care for 2017’s Phantom Thread and his last offering, 2021’s Licorice Pizza, though a warm and appealing slice of nostalgia, wasn’t the finest work from the director of There Will be Blood and (in my humble opinion) his masterpiece, Magnolia.

One Battle After Another, as the name suggests, is an action film, perhaps the last genre I’d have expected this most enigmatic of film-makers to explore but, happily, he puts his own unique spin on it, producing a sprawling, multi-faceted tale set over the best part of two decades. It’s larger than life, peopled by a series of eccentrically-named caricatures and yet, once it settles into its stride, it manages to exert a powerful grip.

We first join the action as Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), along with other members of their far-left terrorist group, French 75, launch an armed attack on a detention centre in California and free all of the captives. During the action, Perfidia encounters the unit’s commanding officer, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), and – in a move intended to humiliate him – makes him masturbate at gunpoint. However, this only causes him to fixate on her, something that will have inevitable consequences further down the line.

Pat and Perfidia become partners, but their haphazard attempts to parent their baby daughter, Willa, seem doomed to failure – especially when Perfidia is captured and forced into witness protection, and Pat is left to deal with the situation alone.

Sixteen years later, Willa (Chase Infiniti) has grown to be an independent teenager, preferring to follow the guidance of her karate instructor, Sergio (an underused Benicio Del Toro), than her drug-addled old man. Pat hasn’t been involved in any terrorist activity in years, preferring to experiment with every drug he can lay his hands on but when, out of the blue, a coded telephone call reaches him, announcing that Lockjaw (now a Colonel) is coming after Willa, he’s forced to get up off the sofa and go to her aid…

From this point, the film pretty much delivers on the promise of the title – it’s a frenetic, explosive and breathless chase filtered through cinematographer Michael Bauman’s VistaVision lenses, and backed by Jonny Greenwood’s eccentric score. Written by Anderson and loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, the director has reputedly been working on this project for something like 20 years so it’s remarkable that it feels as timely as it does.

DiCaprio is wonderfully endearing as the hapless Pat, desperately trying to remember passwords that he hasn’t used for far too long, while Penn, as the heinous, macho Lockjaw, is the personification of a living GI Joe action figure, a man committed to preserving his outward appearance, while inside he’s a festering, ambitious wreck. But strangely, it’s newcomer Infiniti who really impresses here as the quietly determined Willa, who, when pushed, snaps back with the stubborn tenacity she’s inherited from her mother.

One Battle After Another is a searing condemnation of contemporary America, a world where freedom has to be fought for with extreme violence, where the most cold-blooded assassins hide behind the personas of smiling, corn-fed patriots. PTA finds original ways to explore the most well-worn conventions. Even the old fall-back of the car chase is given a mesmerising makeover, as vehicles glide silently through a shimmering waterfall of desert roads like some kind of LSD-induced hallucination.

Despite a hefty running time of two hours and 41 minutes, the film flashes by in what feels like half that time and it’s clear pretty much from the outset that Paul Thomas Anderson is back on form. Whatever comes next, I’m already looking forward to it.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney