FILM.
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
2025 | DIRECTED BY PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
It’s not that action movies need to be elevated — they exist for the purpose of entertainment. But they’re formulaic, and One Battle After Another isn’t exempt. While Anderson’s touch makes it slick — seamless camera work, hip needle drops, highish-brow references — the film’s chase-plot trope is generic enough that any number of directors could have shepherded through a print. Someone less ambitious might have fit it more squarely within the genre. As it stands, Anderson’s conceptual commitments tempt him to simultaneously do too much and too little, tripping up the film with confused themes by stepping one foot in the revolution while leaving the other out.
This is my sobered-up take after minute 162. Around minute five, watching the French 75 rebels liberate a camp of migrants from a detention center, I was worried President Donald J. Trump might try to ban the film. Almost by accident, One Battle After Another hits the bullseye of our cultural moment: political violence, ICE raids, secret Anglo-Saxon societies — Assata Shakur dying on the eve of the theatrical release. Hot-button topics any day, they take on a particular buzz in light of recent real-life analogues such as Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Trump’s mass-deportation agenda, and the renewed scrutiny of Epstein’s underworld.
But the opening scene turns out to be the high-water mark of envelope-pushing. The film’s militants are quickly trivialized as performative nymphos, sucking face mid-mission or boning under exploding buildings to get their rocks off. When their leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), is caught fleeing a bank robbery, she perfidiously rats out her comrades and enters witness protection before fleeing to Mexico. Thirty minutes in, the cynical message appears to be that revolutionaries are libidinous cosplayers who fold under Uncle Sam’s slightest pressure.
The next two hours and change are essentially a flash forward to a Taken parody, with Liam Neeson’s ex-black ops tactician swapped for Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a bomb technician turned grumbling, bumbling boomer dad. Out of shape from 16 years of smoking, drinking, and lazing around, Bob shambles after Willa (Chase Infiniti), the daughter he ostensibly shares with Perfidia, falling off roofs and out of cars in the process. He races to find her, albeit slowly, against Col. Stephen Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a cartoonishly stiff military officer with a thing for Black women whose membership in a white supremacist group rests on covering up that he may have fathered a mixed-race daughter.
As the screwball setup suggests, you’ll likely be cracking up throughout and on the edge of your seat more than once. The performances are top shelf and the plot is propulsive. But the whole thing becomes innocuous, like watching The Battle of Algiers from your couch while smoking a joint. By the end, rather than censoring it, I pictured Trump inviting RFK Jr. to the White House screening room for a good laugh and to chide him for his uncanny resemblance to Penn’s clenched, grimacing colonel.
None of this is in any way disqualifying. It’s a good movie, just not great. And because it’s Paul Thomas Anderson, I’m disappointed. It feels conceptually lazy for his standards, with a non-starter premise that transplants ’60s radicalism onto 2025. The likelihood of a Weather Underground-esque group getting away with running around detonating bombs is essentially nil under the modern surveillance state.
Thomas Pynchon fans may snort, “It’s supposed to be satirical, not believable!” One Battle After Another is inspired by Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which takes aim at the hippie-to-yuppie pipeline, where counterculture gets defanged and sold back to us as nostalgic entertainment. In this light, the film’s fetishized revolutionaries reflect a real cultural phenomenon. But conducting sly postmortems of ’60s idealism is hardly an original pastime, nor is it, I’d argue, the political lesson we need right now. Ironic distancing excels at tearing down old values, but it leaves a void where they stood. A quarter into the 21st century, it might be time to stop burying ourselves deeper in the rubble of detachment and start trying to build again.
Anderson himself seems caught between ironic and sincere impulses, unsure of what he wants the film to say and especially how it should end. By turns a postmodern deconstruction of radical politics, a dysfunctional family melodrama, and a Hallmark card to the revolutionary potential of The Youth, he may have lost the plot somewhere along the 20 years of rewrites. When most-wanted Willa drives off to a protest three and a half hours away while most-wanted Bob fiddles around on his very trackable iPhone attempting a selfie, I prayed this wasn’t the clumsy ending we’d be left with. But then the credits rolled. (No one in the theater clapped.)
Who knows, maybe Anderson just felt like blowing stuff up, and he has every right to. But for those of us looking for a little more depth, we have every right to be underwhelmed.
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