Review: One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson has sometimes been accused, lovingly, of being allergic to the present tense. Even his one modern romance was a shag-carpet daydream of pudding points and Shelley Duvall needle drops, a 21st-century movie pressed like a flower between 1970s pages. One Battle After Another doesn’t just meet the now; it collides with it, airbag deploying, smoke in your nose, a little rattled and suddenly very awake. It’s Anderson’s most here-and-now film, and, fittingly, his most anxious, an IMAX panic attack braided into a shaggy-dog stoner chase picture with jokes sharp enough to draw blood.

The setup is pulp simplicity and morally thorny, loosely based on a Thomas Pynchon novel. A militant collective called the French 75 pulls a jailbreak on a California detention center, and the new guy with the dynamite, a bathrobe-ready arson cherub named Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), proves he can make sparks fly, with explosives and with the group’s star player, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, volcanic and hilariously un-saintly). They create a child; they also create a problem. Their escape leaves a humiliated Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, weaponizing his self-seriousness into supreme menace with a dash of comedy) with a fetishized vendetta and the kind of power that never needs an excuse, just a pretext.

Anderson, vibing with Pynchon like he did in Inherent Vice but swapping weed-haze nostalgia for righteous fury, lets the revolution eat its own tail. Perfidia’s survival instinct curdles into self-preservation; Pat, eventually plain old Bob, ends up a baked single dad in the piney enclave of Baktan Cross, hiding from his past and helicoptering his hyper-competent daughter Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti). Sixteen years pass and nothing important gets better, if anything, it gets tackier. The racist country club goes full Santa cult (hail, St. Nick!), the uniforms come with a wink, and Lockjaw is still stomping around like he’s clenched from the neck down. When the hammer finally falls on Baktan Cross, it feels less like escalation than inevitability.

DiCaprio is tremendous here, playing a man whose fight has migrated from the streets to the kitchen sink. Bob slouches through scenes in an open robe, chugging Modelo like hydration therapy, a paranoid goofball whose buffoonery never cancels out his tenderness. Anderson has long adored men who mistake momentum for progress; Bob is the opposite, a guy who’s finally stopped running and discovered that immobility is its own terror. He’s very funny, DiCaprio showing his knack for physical humor here, and the approach lands because the film lets him be small. He’s less a protagonist than a liability in his own movie, someone the plot must carry like a sleepy toddler.

Enter Sensei (Benicio Del Toro), Baktan Cross’s deadpan guardian angel, who treats state violence like weather: inevitable, survivable, and not worth panic if you know how to breathe. Del Toro plays him as a patient rebuke to Bob’s flailing, a new classic Anderson character in three scenes and a mantra. “Ocean waves,” he says of existential siege. The movie believes him. It also believes in cars. The Highway 78 chase, those blind humps cresting like the sea, is a stunner, Michael Bauman’s camera inhaling the landscape while Andy Jurgensen’s cutting resists the modern urge to flinch. No shaky camouflage, no editorial confetti, just geography, consequence, and a joke about velocity: America goes 100 mph to stay exactly where it is.

Jonny Greenwood’s score sprints without moving, a nervous system rendered in piano scales that crawl up and down looking for exits before the strings swallow them. That musical gag, motion as stasis, doubles as the film’s worldview. One Battle After Another is silly (rebel nuns! a candy-cane Klan!), but the silliness functions like lacquer over rotten wood. Anderson keeps finding the seam where laughter turns to nausea. In 2025, a secret white-supremacist society feels adorably retro; the joke is that secrecy was once the concession. Not anymore.

PTA still loves an ensemble cast, and he spreads affection around: Regina Hall gives militant conviction the soul of a school principal; Alana Haim weaponizes normalcy; Shayna “Junglepussy” McHayle talks like a stand-up and fights like a tank. Yet the film belongs to two beats: Penn’s Lockjaw discovering horniness as a political crisis, and Chase Infiniti turning Willa into the calm at the eye of Dad’s storm. Willa isn’t a miracle child; she’s the adult in the room. The movie’s meanest punchline is that parental paranoia is a luxury item: kids already know the drill.

That’s the movie’s covert tenderness. Anderson, long our patron saint of men who mistake obsession for purpose, quietly shifts the axis from the battle to the baton handoff. Bob can’t win the fights he started; he can barely finish a thought. But he can show up, late, sweating, high, and realize his daughter doesn’t need a savior, just a parent who’s willing to be present in the present. For a filmmaker so fluent in regret, that’s borderline radical. The film marks Anderson's clear shift from the damage fathers cause to the hope that they can do right by their children.

By the film's end, the lullaby feels earned in a way the lecture wouldn’t. In a world calibrated to humiliate, comfort is not capitulation; it’s ammunition. One Battle After Another is PTA’s funniest movie in a while, and his most lucid since There Will Be Blood. It may not change America, but it might change the angle at which you’re bracing against it, one hand on the wheel, eyes up over the next hill, listening for ocean waves.

4.5/5