ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER Review: Delightful, Overlong, and Politically Dubious

It's a genuine shock to learn that the characters Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) were not named by Thomas Pynchon, whose novel Vineland inspired Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another.

Pynchon may be just as famous for his silly names as his labyrinthine plots, so I incorrectly assumed these names were his creations, but no, they're PTA inventions. As is most of One Battle After Another, for better and worse.

Pynchon's novel centers on hippies living in the time of Reagan; Anderson updates that to anti-border revolutionaries of the late 2000s living in our openly white supremacist United States. The movie begins 16 years ago in order to establish the web of relationships between Perfidia, Lockjaw, and Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) that sets the stage for the action to come.

Pat and Perfidia are members of revolutionary group the French 75, who fall in love, and soon she's pregnant. When the child is born, Pat steps back from the battle for liberation while Perfidia continues taking big risks. When an outing goes sideways, Perfidia finds herself in Lockjaw's power and decides to name names. Lockjaw uses the information to take out the majority of the French 75, leaving a few scattered survivors, and Perfidia is placed in witness protection.

Now, Lockjaw returns to his quest to eliminate the French 75, having been activated by the opportunity to join a white nationalist organization known as the Christmas Adventurers. Pat has become Bob and his daughter, born Charlene, is called Willa (Chase Infiniti) after they've gone through the revolutionary version of witness protection.

We get a somewhat insightful and very funny glimpse of the father/teenage daughter relationship as she challenges his paranoia and overprotectiveness, while also parenting him about alcohol safety before leaving for a school dance. It doesn't take long for the action to start, though, and soon Lockjaw and his men are invading the high school and blowing the doors off Bob and Willa's home.

The following half hour of One Battle After Another is pure manic magic. Long takes create suspense and hilarity in equal measure, often both at the same time, as the camera pans to capture DiCaprio skittering from one point to another in his oversized bathrobe. Handheld tracking shots of people running down hallways, through tunnels, and over rooftops place us in the chaos.

Johnny Greenwood's driving, minimalist piano and percussion score is downright stressful yet somehow never overwhelms the comedy. Crosscutting between Bob's almost sprawling journey and Willa's covert extraction by old ally Deandra (an underused Regina Hall) helps balance the tone, with one side delivering on laughs and the other on tension.

Unfortunately, the film doesn't maintain its frenzied energy and drops into a lower register before entirely stalling out in the final 20 minutes. The thriller elements remain effective as things slow down, but the humor falls off significantly, setting the stage for the complete exit of momentum.

At some point in the back half, the movie goes very quiet and simply deflates. In part, this is because these more hushed attempts at tension-building pale in comparison to the earlier mania, and in part because the film has been going on too long. An obvious narrative choice that pushes the story to go on longer doesn't help. It's detrimental to the movie and especially disappointing coming from a filmmaker who's talked about the need to edit stories down and called one of his own films "way too fucking long."

It's also structurally odd that the shift out of breakneck comedy into something more subdued is precipitated by one of the movie's silliest scenes. A group of Christmas Adventurers gather in a secret lair that's just as Austin Powers as it is James Bond to discuss Lockjaw's future with the organization and bookend their racist conversation with "Hail Saint Nick!" It's an undeniably funny scene that also speaks to One Battle After Another's political position.

This is a movie about good-guy, left wing, anti-racists fighting against bad white nationalists, so I won't be accusing it of being reactionary in any way; Anderson's update is clearly an attempt at timeliness. It's also one of the most joyously nonsensical movies to grace multiplex screens in recent years (albeit in the wake of The Naked Gun, audiences' barometers may be broken).

The deflation of that joyous nonsense as the film goes on may be a gesture towards seriously engaging with the movie's material, but One Battle After Another never seems to take its characters, or their worldviews, seriously. Rather than striking the perfect note at the perfect time, the film's timeliness and absurdity make for an uncomfortable combination.

When racist, militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents violently disappear people on a regular basis, it's harder to enjoy the men who enable them being satirized. Similarly, while DiCaprio's performance and the film's portrait of left wing bureaucracy may offer a bevy of laugh-out-loud moments, they defang the idea of organized rebellion against oppressive power structures. And this isn't an issue of non-violence, as the film's opening sequence shows an invasion and evacuation of an immigrant detention center where our heroes carry guns but never fire one.

It's perhaps ironic that in the time between preproduction in 2023 and release in 2025, One Battle After Another has only become more relevant and suspect in equal measure. Hopefully, in time it will be less relevant and easier to enjoy, because there is a lot to enjoy.

The film opens Friday, September 26, only in movie theaters, via Warner Bros. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes, and to search via the viewer's preferred format.