One Battle After Another (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

One Battle After Another (2025) – P. T. Anderson

Time may not exist very clearly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest (and greatest?) film, which begins in an era where Weather Underground-styled activists are attacking the authoritarian and anti-immigration actions of the current US government and then fast-forwards 16 years to another timepoint where, uh, not much has changed, except the revolutionaries have aged and the authoritarians have tightened their grip.  Sounds serious (and topical) but this is a comedy … and an action film, complete with car chases.  In fact, the film script (also by P. T. Anderson but indebted to Pynchon) had been gestating for 20 years, starting with Anderson’s desire to extend his range with those car chases.  That he does.  However, the comic-book broadness of the characters here (specifically Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J Lockjaw and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson) doesn’t feel too far afield from Anderson’s other Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice (2014), with a similar goofy vibe. But One Battle After Another is Anderson at the top of his powers and fearless in his willingness to “go there”. Surprisingly, this may also be Leo’s greatest performance ever – and certainly his funniest – as he bumbles his way through the action as a past-his-prime substance-addled/depleted former rebel, now paranoid stay-at-home single dad to Chase Infiniti’s mixed-race teenager, who both get dumped into a neo-Nazi operation to cleanse America.  Benicio del Toro plays a welcome role as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a karate instructor who helps Bob out. Indeed, there are a variety of excellent character turns here from faces familiar and not (Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Eric Schweig, more) that heighten the kaleidoscopic experience which still, in the end, stacks up as an action movie/thriller with a not-so-disguised political theme (and call to action). Highly recommended!