I initially actively resisted One Battle After Another (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video): A story of angry leftists violently opposing a not-ICE-but-basically-still-ICE anti-immigration military group, which sows fear and chaos and abuses power and stages riots in the streets? Are our nerves not already raw enough, considering the state of our current American reality? But my defenses crumbled as I realized director Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t interested in simplistic political screeds or button-pushing for its own sake. Adapting, very loosely, Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland – itself inspired by the actions of Nixon-era militant Marxists the Weather Underground – Anderson creates an ever-so-slightly heightened reality for this story of cultural and ideological turmoil, anchored by a fraught, but ever loving father-daughter relationship, and the film is at once a nerve-shredding thriller, a robust comedy and an exhilarating action extravaganza. Is One Battle After Another the ultimate movie for our times? It just might be.
The Gist: Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the explosives expert of the French 75. Yes, Ghetto Pat. People in this movie have names like that. His girlfriend is Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), and their nemesis is Capt. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). See what I mean? Now how seriously can we take it when Pat, Perfidia and a crew of heavily armed radicals take over an immigration detention center near the Mexico border to set the detainees free, humiliating supervisor Lockjaw in the process? These are comic book names. They aren’t comic book situations, but portions of this film are unserious enough in their seriousness to remind us that we’re not feeling the same relentless nausea of Alex Garland’s upsettingly probable Civil War; the film’s also serious enough in its unseriousness to separate it from the nihilistic “comedy” of Ari Aster’s Eddington.
Anyway. As the French 75 cause blackouts with bombs and rob banks to fund their cause, Pat and Perfidia’s love blooms. Lockjaw keeps an eye on Perfidia, specifically his very male eye, on her derriere, prompting a compromise: A hotel-room tryst in exchange for Lockjaw not siccing his goons on the French 75. That moment’s immediately followed by a shot of Perfidia firing a machine gun on a range, the butt of the weapon recoiling alongside her massively pregnant belly. She gives birth to a girl. Pat wants to settle and raise her. Perfidia isn’t so sure about that. Lockjaw moves in on the French 75. It splinters. Perfidia is arrested and bargains her way to witness protection by ratting out the French 75, and Pat and the baby go on the run and 16 years pass and Pat is now Bob Ferguson and the girl is Willa (Chase Infiniti) and they live off the grid in Baktan Cross, California. Lockjaw is now Col. Lockjaw and he’s angling for a spot in a secret society of White guys who don’t like people who aren’t White. Lockjaw’s group is still active, searching for Bob – we’ll just call him Bob now, he’s Bob – and Willa. For reasons. Reasons that haven’t been stated but the visual language of the movie has communicated rather clearly.
Bob is a mess. His brain. His poor brain, fried and addled by drugs and inactivity and paranoia. Willa somehow is strong and sufficient, and one of the prides of Sensei Sergio’s (Benicio del Toro) Ninja Academy – yes, Ninja Academy – but ostensibly a typical teenager. She chews her dad’s ass for drinking too much and driving home – “But I know how to drink and drive, honey,” he retorts – and then goes to the school dance with her friends. That’s when Lockjaw strikes. He doesn’t have the drop on Willa, though; she’s scooped up by French 75 straggler Deandra (Regina Hall), and they zoom into the desert to hide out with the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, which is the last funny name I’ll reveal. Promise.
Meanwhile, Bob has to drop everything but the old antiquated untraceable cell phone the French 75 gave him and run run run, in his sloppyass bathrobe, to Sensei Sergio, who calmly assists our panicking idiot burnout. Sensei Sergio, who provides an electrical outlet for Bob’s gol damned uncharged phone he needs to use to contact the French 75 stronghold who ask him for passwords that the psychedelics long ago murdered and left for dead in Bob’s melted hippocampus; All Bob wants is the rendezvous point so he can reunite with Willa, his protective-dad instincts kicking into overdrive but struggling to find purchase among all the dead brain cells. Sensei Sergio, who sees Lockjaw’s troops converging on Baktan Cross to stage a crackdown, and therefore must tend to the “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” he oversees. Things only get crazier from here, for all involved parties. But amidst the chaos and constant motion, Sensei Sergio and Bob still manage to drink a few small beers. There’s never a bad time for a few small beers.
Photo: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Weapons. Two righteously provocative 2025 films have steadfastly refused to be easily pigeonholed; have offered precarious but absorbing tonal stews; have inspired massive laughs underscored by rousing, dynamic ideas. And those films are Weapons and One Battle After Another.
Performance Worth Watching: This film features one standout performance after, um, each previous standout performance. DiCaprio plays another extraordinary bumbler and Penn is a rigid, limping, tinydick, stick-in-the-ass, roided-out hoo-rah utterly loathsome bulldog hypocrite; both are brilliant satirical characterizations teeming with unexpected depth. Taylor scorches all in her path with her lust for action of all types. Hall is an underused grounding force. But the VIPs here are del Toro, a walking and talking raised eyebrow of zen-master comic brilliance, and Infiniti, who carries the emotional weight of the film with steadfast intensity.
Sex And Skin: Some aggressive, but mostly implied, off-screen/out-of-frame action.
Photo: Everett Collection
Our Take: One Battle After Another is a to-its-marrow American film, Anderson contriving an invigorating, funny, upsetting, confounding, perfectly imperfect masterpiece to mirror life in this fucking country. Set in the now and the future and also in the past, it provides a metaphorical but also phantasmagorical but also realistic glimpse into this fucking country’s yesterday, today and tomorrow. I speak in circles because there may be lulls and peaks in intensity but the battles will keep coming as they did and do in the 1860s, 1960s and 2020s. The good guys do bad things and the bad guys do bad things and the flummoxed and inflamed majority trapped between them is tempted to be Bob Fergusons who smoke doobs, watch old movies and never leave the house, paralyzed and sabotaging themselves and their cultural virility, hoping – key word: hoping – the children they’ve spawned possess enough gumption to make the world a better place, because we’ve clearly failed.
One of the many threads in this crazy quilt of a film tracks Willa’s coming of age as a daughter of revolutionaries, and the dynamic she engages in with her increasingly hollowed-out father. The film prompted a deep conversation between myself and a friend half my age about the generation gap, and how sharp the contrast between youth and aging can be in an age of divisiveness and turmoil. Anderson likely conceived the core relationship of One Battle After Another in response to being the father of mixed-race children (he’s been coupled with Maya Rudolph since 2001), but the broader idea addresses how Gen Xers are gracelessly aging out of any relevant zeitgeist, leaving a mess for their successors to squeegee off the cultural and political windshield. Life itself is for the young, because the weary aged ones often have absconded it before they’ve ceased breathing. But hope lingers.
Such is the Big Everything Anderson throws a net over with this film, knowing damn well it’s too big and unwieldy to ever contain, even in 161 minutes. Some will see it as inherently political and be disappointed by it, some will be roused or infuriated by its verisimilitude or perceived lack thereof. It’s functionally a shattered looking glass; you see the shards that reflect your own political-social-personal ideologies back at you. On another level entirely, it’s a propulsive, hilarious action film with set pieces that push Anderson in the general direction of – ulp – pleasing a crowd; a steadicam run through Sensei Sergio’s interconnected community roots our perspective in Bob’s bewilderment, and a climactic car chase set on a rolling-hill desert highway will raise your every hair, all as Jonny Greenwood’s skittery, nervy score keeps you on edge. One Battle After Another is as explosive as things, films, life, all the things, everything, gets.
Our Call: Again: perfectly imperfect masterpiece. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
