☆☆☆☆☆
Don't be fooled by appearances. Although it's been more than a month since my last post about a current film, those weeks have been filled with moviegoing. The focus, however, has been on the growing number of theaters in the Los Angeles area that specialize in older films, and given the selection of big-budget studio releases lately, watching the massively underrated Joe Versus the Volcano or Terry Gilliam's messy and disjointed marvel Brazil have seemed far better options.
Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling, unpredictable, and almost impossibly entertaining One Battle After Another makes for quite a spectacular return to the current cinema. No Anderson film has ever been without its interesting qualities, and some, like There Will Be Blood and Magnolia, are among cinema's great achievements.
So it's no small feat that with One Battle After Another, Anderson tops even himself. While there are moments in which it can seem too overstuffed, too complicated and byzantine, every excess is ultimately forgivable in a film that makes a 2 hour, 50 minute running time seem like nothing at all.
Even more astonishing is how One Battle After Another was decades in the making and more than a year in production, but is so prescient and pointed about current political flashpoints that conservative, MAGA-style pundits have begun actively complaining about the movie, saying it's loaded against them, that it glorifies left-wing politics and makes heroes out of its "Antifa-style" protagonists.
Which it does. Gleefully. Proudly. Inspired by or loosely based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (enough that Pynchon and his novel get on-screen credit), the movie telegraphs its political leanings right from the start, putting us into the thick of a mission by leftist revolutionaries to free hundreds of detained immigrants from the clutches of a militarized police force so vile it's run by a man with the cartoonish name Lockjaw (Sean Penn). The revolutionaries are called French 75 and are led by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). She's a fierce, committed warrior, unafraid to come face-to-face with Lockjaw, and certain about her cause. He's idealistic, laconic, and hopelessly in love with Perfidia Beverly Hills.
But she won't let love get in the way of her fight, and after she gets pregnant, she leaves the baby girl in the care of Bob and fellow French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall), and sixteen years later the girl is a young woman who is testing the boundaries of her life, which has been constrained by Bob's fear of being found. He's right to be afraid, because Lockjaw has vowed to hunt him down.
Most of the movie, while set against some extreme (and distressingly familiar) political violence, becomes the story of Lockjaw's relentless pursuit of Bob and the daughter, Willa (played with incredible intensity by Chase Infiniti), after Perfidia — following an incident of terrifying violence — drops out of the world. To escape Lockjaw's dogged determination to find them, Bob and Willa seek the help of a Spanish-speaking karate sensei who leads a sort of underground railroad allied with what's left of Bob's revolutionary idealism.
For a moment, it looks like Bob and Willa might be safe, but Lockjaw won't let it go. He is Ahab to Bob's constantly stoned, Dude-abiding whale. The setup, both complicated and, ultimately, remarkably simple, gives Anderson the opportunity to do something he hasn't done before — show that he knows how to make an action movie. Does he ever. Woven into his story of politics, loyalty and relentless dedication to a cause are scenes of seat-gripping, gasp-inducing intensity. They're also — and this is the really unexpected thing — enormously fun and funny.
Anderson wastes no opportunity to make One Battle After Another into many things rolled into one: intense drama, sensational action, and, most satisfyingly, unpredictable comedy. I laughed harder than I have in even the highest-profile comedies, but they're mixed with bold and surprising action, so well edited and shot that a few of the chase sequences almost certainly will be included alongside the all time great action moments.
One Battle After Another is a movie that earns both the attention it receives from rapt audiences, and the many laughs and gasps it elicits along the way. It's a movie of big ideas, big images, and big characters. Penn's Lockjaw will go down as one of the most loathsome and wildly inappropriate military creations since Dr. Strangelove, a movie that shares some of the same DNA. Lockjaw's story leads to some of the most unexpectedly pointed political satire of recent years. It's no wonder conservative extremists are so worked up over One Battle After Another. They are the targets that this film aims for — and constantly, satisfyingly, always hits.
Viewed October 3, 2025 — Vista Theater
1830
