R | 2h 41m | Action, Drama, Comedy | 2025
“One Battle After Another” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Benicio del Toro stands at 96-percent for critics, 85-percent for the audience on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s got big numbers, big movie stars, a big director, and it’s on IMAX. It’s a big movie. A high degree of critic-love is usually a red flag for me. An interesting coincidence is that the centrist Epoch Times was promised a seat at the press screening, but got booted out last minute.
The one positive thing I’ll say is that “One Battle After Another” keeps your attention from start to finish, and with a run-time of two hours and 41 minutes, that’s a neat trick. Part of it has to do with the soundtrack sounding like someone trapped a Jack Russell terrier (along with a few pots and pans) inside a piano. It’s relentless.
However, “One Battle After Another,” with its communist revolutionary underpinnings, appears to glorify political violence. When the credits rolled and the regular (non-press) IMAX audience stood up and cheered, I was struck by this movie’s societal irresponsibility.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ghetto Pat (later named Bob Ferguson) the resident explosives expert for a California anti-fascist revolutionary group called The French 75, the leader of which is his black radical consort, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor).
Perfidia is the charismatic albeit cartoonish embodiment of prototypical angry black feminism, as well as being a likewise cartoonishly insatiable sex addict. She and Bob run around doing antifa things, blowing stuff up, with Perfidia desiring sex while not yet clear of their various IED (improvised explosive devices) blast-zones.
Lockjaw
It all kicks off when the two attack an immigrant detention center, combating the government, personified by one Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Lockjaw is the cartoonishly steroidal, hyper-masculine, right-wing military leader of a platoon of ICE operators. The intended running gag throughout is that he’s a repressed homosexual. When a young woman snarkily queries, “Why’s your t-shirt so tight?” he shouts “I’m not gay!” And the audience howls.
Lockjaw hunts Perfidia down, but she sexually assaults him. And then, instead of bringing her to justice, the two of them begin a torrid, dominatrix-type affair.
Eventually Perfidia gets pregnant, and this leads to one of the movie’s vilest visuals—Perfidia ecstatically firing a bandolier of machine gun rounds over her pregnant belly. I’m guessing that probably could radicalize a fetus.
But who’s kid is it? Bob’s or Lockjaw’s? We don’t know for sure yet. Perfidia, true to her name, finally crosses the line and rats out her revolutionary compadres and enters the witness protection program, while Bob runs off with Willa (Chase Infiniti), the daughter who may or may not be his, and goes into hiding for years.
Secret White Supremacist Cabal!
Now, Lockjaw is slavering to be accepted into a farcical Bohemian Grove-Illuminati-KKK-type organization named the Christmas Adventure Club. He knows they’ll have him erased if they discover that he might have a half-black daughter and helps himself to all the powers at ICE’s disposal to track her down.
Soon, Willa is fleeing for her life from possible-dad Lockjaw. Other possible-dad Bob is also in hot pursuit of Willa, but he’s spent over a decade shrinking his brain via pot and booze. He can’t remember where The French 75’s safe house is, or any of the old verbal passwords, so he’s now running around like a chicken with no head trying to find her, often wearing a bathrobe. Bob’s like a very agitated and significantly more weed-addled version of Jeff Bridges’s “The Dude.”
Lastly, there’s the subplot of Benicio del Toro’s character. His Sensei Sergio St. Carlos is a sort of Latino Harriet Tubman, presiding over an extensive Underground Railroad-type network that harbors illegal aliens.
Reckless Paean to Radical Terrorism
“One Battle After Another” is Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of author Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland.” Anderson uses it to romanticize 1960’s Vietnam and civil rights political violence, drawing parallels to the real anti-establishment skirmishes perpetrated by radical groups such as the Black Panthers (pervaded by Marxist-Leninist ideology) and the Weather Underground (which received assistance from communist Cuba).
Anderson appears to laud the American left’s recent escalating attacks on conservatives (three failed assassination attempts of the president). While it’s all presented as entertainment, the macabre coincidence of this film opening in the literal and metaphorical wake of the assassination of peaceable conservative debater Charlie Kirk makes the whole thing feel morally reprehensible.
And while this fiction may coincide with America’s current political turmoil, its comic bloodshed and political absurdity exploits young political confusion using trendy chic, slick progressivism to grease the rails.
It all culminates in the presentation—a coming-out party, or maybe coronation—of biracial daughter Willa, who’s genetically downloaded both her parents’ murderous tendencies. “Maybe you will save the world,” intones her mother from the Great Beyond. It’s a moment clearly intended to invoke Sarah Connor’s last message to her future, savior-like son, John, in 1984’s “The Terminator,” who will liberate us all from the cosmos’s evil terminators for all eternity.
Voila—Willa becomes the film’s American Girl violent revolutionary heroine—the face and savior of future America from conservative values. All, unsurprisingly, is underscored by Anderson’s use of Tom Petty’s “American Girl.”
The problem with “One Battle After Another” is that the characters are so over the top, it’s difficult to tell if Anderson is being serious or not. The whole thing seems to be giving a hall pass to political assassination—as Perfidia says to Lockjaw, “Revolutionary violence is the only way!” Anderson appears to be intentionally kicking the hornet’s nest of the left, and inciting Gen-Z, Gen-Alpha, and Gen-Beta audience members—who are by and large clueless regarding the 1960s counterculture references—to blood-lust.
If, underneath all the nuttiness, Anderson is deadly serious about the message, and using comedy as a Trojan Horse to deliver it, then the civil war-stoking “One Battle After Another” is 2025’s most reckless and irresponsible film to date. As I mentioned at the outset, it is a wild ride, with some laughs and a fun car chase, but you will exit the theater not wanting to hear a piano for a long time.
“One Battle After Another” opens exclusively in theaters on Sept. 26.
‘One Battle After Another’
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hour, 41 minutes
Release Date: Sept. 26, 2025
Rating: 3 stars out of 5 for entertainment, 1 star for goading revolution, irrespective of intention
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