Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

Despite being based on a 1990 novel, many aspects of One Battle After Another will feel familiar in 2025. The military on American streets. The rounding up of undocumented people. Fervent protests in opposition. That America is still wrapped up in the same things Thomas Pynchon envisioned over 30 years ago speaks to a seemingly endless battle America is waging with itself. Hint hint. Get the name now?

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson moves the events up to present day, largely following the befuddled stoner Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), as they reckon with family history. As we see in the film’s opening scenes, Bob was once a member of a far-left group who violently rejected American culture. Bob’s partner, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), was at the forefront of the group, and she refused to slow down over such a small thing as their child. Her antics pissed off and turned on one particular member of the military, Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who won’t let them go all these years later. Perfidia has fled the country while Bob and Willa hide in small-town California. Lockjaw is stuck on them not just out of lust for Perfidia but for the looming question of whether Willa is secretly his child, which would mess up his membership in a white supremacist group. Lockjaw uses the weight of the US military to come after Willa, and in order to save her, Bob must shape up and re-enter the underground.

The problem is that Bob is bad at it. His nerves are frayed and he can’t remember passwords or locations. So he bounces from one waypoint to another, less a hero and more a guy fumbling around.

His circuitous route forms the backbone of the episodic film, which jumps from serious situation to serious situation, never taking any of them seriously. It’s a screwball comedy more concerned with finding absurdity than wallowing in meaning. If you want to draw ties to the trajectory of America you can, but the film isn’t going to slow down long enough for you to ponder them. If you slow down you might end up like Bob: overwhelmed, defeated, and detached. Instead, Anderson wants you to feel something about our current state, even if that feeling remains amorphous.

So he throws some gloriously huge action scenes at you, from the raid of a detention center to the tunnel hopping of Benicio del Toro’s karate teacher/protector of undocumented people. Mostly, though, the camera locks in on whatever character is stumbling through the madness, effectively paralleling how we stumble through a chaotic world we can’t possibly control. 

It’s rare for DiCaprio to play such an everyman, but he jumps into the role with ease. How could he not when he spent the shoot largely in Bob’s comfy pajamas and robe? He milks the character’s clumsy reentry into battling the man for all the physical comedy he can, but underneath he always maintains a frantic concern for his daughter that eats away at him. His heavy substance use was taking its tole on their relationship before Lockjaw rolled in and began blowing everything up, and there’s a sense that his journey is about saving their relationship along with her life.

This is reinforced by the fact that Willa proves surprisingly capable for such a young person. She’s got plenty of her mom in her, including a passionate sense of right and wrong and a stubborn will to fight. When she lands temporarily at a convent safe house, she takes up a gun, paralleling a shot of Perfidia earlier in the film, but she is more measured and controlled with the weapon. Infiniti does an excellent job of making Willa seem suitable but inexperienced with the sudden chaos, which allows the film to sustain her peril for its long runtime without it becoming uncomfortable.

Penn, on the other hand, goes full caricature with his white supremacist villain. His strut overplays his musculature, his desires are barely contained, and there’s a pathetic simplicity to his ideas. The character is intended to be laughed at, but America elected an even more obvious buffoon to the Presidency just a year before the film’s release. It’s hard to parody a group’s blunt tricks when they’re actually working, and every time the film goes for a laugh at Lockjaw’s expense, reality stifles the joy.

Outside of Lockjaw, though, One Battle After Another stumbles around amiably. The scale Paul Thomas Anderson is working at is so gloriously silly for such a ramshackle story that it’s hard not to have fun, even if it is just a fleeting diversion.

Release: In theaters now
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writers: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti