Paul Thomas Anderson brings us a live action ICE Age.
Paul Thomas Anderson has always worked at the fraying edges of the American myth, picking at its contradictions and delusions, but often through the lens of nostalgia or retrospect. One Battle After Another changes that. This time he’s deep in the marrow of the now, delivering a film that feels not only urgent but incendiary, a two-and-a-half-hour jolt of paranoia, politics and pulp energy that threatens to blow a hole straight through the present tense.
At its centre lies “Bob Ferguson” (Leonardo DiCaprio), a once-fired-up revolutionary who’s now a fried-out husk, hiding from the world in a haze of weed and regret, clinging to the company of his sharp, independent daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his old nemesis Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (Sean Penn, all gnarled menace and repugnant swagger) drags the past back into the light and Willa is taken, Bob’s chaotic rescue mission takes place amidst something far thornier. The chase is the hook; the rot in America’s foundations is the catch.
Anderson infuses the film – an original story, although heavily influenced by his long burning desire to adapt Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland – with the kind of tonal volatility most filmmakers would blanche at. It’s an action thriller one moment, a bruising political essay the next, then abruptly a fractured family drama before snapping back to a shootout/ slapstick comedy. Against the odds, it still emerges coherently. Not smoothly, but with a spiky rhythm that mirrors the chaos it depicts. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood provides a score that screeches and thrums like an orchestra in the midst of a civil war, while cinematographer Michael Bauman’s widescreen compositions give even the most frantic exchanges a strange majesty. Despite its 162-minute heft, it never slackens; the film’s pace is bruising and relentless.
And yet, for all that ferocious energy, One Battle After Another is longer than it needs to be. There are moments of indulgence that feel like they could, and maybe should, have been trimmed, saved perhaps for an extended edition or a deleted scenes feature. They’re not pacing or editing missteps so much as potentially Anderson’s reluctance to “kill his darlings”, most notably in a darkly sardonic but unnecessary coda involving Penn’s repellent Lockjaw.
Anderson’s skill is in how he makes such a heady cocktail goes down so easily, a Long Island Ice Tea of American hypocrisy. Anderson threads heavy commentary on white supremacy, state violence and America’s endlessly fractal revolutionary cycles through a plot that, stripped of its intellect and overt politics, could play as a popcorn blockbuster, the kind of alt-universe version that would make you shudder: Michael Bay’s One Battle After Another. That accessibility isn’t a dilution but strategy; the politics hit harder because the genre thrills are so intoxicating. By the time Anderson unleashes the third act of rooftops dashes, car chases, and firefights, the spectacle becomes the garnish to the fury that’s ingrained.
DiCaprio is in top form, leaning into his weathered charisma rather than fighting it. “Bob” is equal parts tragic screw-up and unlikely hero, and DiCaprio pitches him perfectly: a twitchy mess whose every failure makes his flashes of bravery sing all the more. He is, of course, the marquee name but never hogs that limelight, generously giving space to his co-stars. Penn seizes his chance to crank things up to 11 without losing an ounce of menace, borrowing elements from the likes of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn to create a grotesquely compelling monster without ever tipping over into full-blown cartoon villainy and Benicio del Toro drifts in on his own wavelength, reminding you how much fun he can be when left to his eccentricities, and infusing his every scene with a world-weary and heartbreaking nonchalance in the face of constant threats of immigration raids.
But it’s Chase Infiniti who really lights the film’s emotional fuse. In her first major role she doesn’t just hold her own opposite DiCaprio, she anchors the back half of the film with presence and poise. Once she enters the story as a true partner rather than just a daughter to be saved, Anderson’s scattershot narrative suddenly locks into focus. Willa’s resilience reframes Bob’s shambolic journey from paranoia to purpose, giving the cruelty a very human price.
What One Battle After Another ultimately argues is that America never really changes its uniform, it just cycles through the same bloody wardrobe. Anderson stages revolution as rerun, showing how racism, repression and state violence regenerate across decades. It’s why the film feels both timely and timeless, haunted by history yet raging in the present. Its anger is sweeping but never vague: this is America, as it was, as it still insists on being.
Exhilarating, devastating, and utterly electrifying, One Battle After Another may be Anderson’s most accessible film since Boogie Nights, but it’s also one of his most dangerous. It smuggles radical fury inside a muscular action package and dares the audience to enjoy themselves while the system burns. Thirty years into his career, Anderson has delivered a film that is both a howl of incandescent rage and a crowd-pleaser, a rare hybrid that deserves to rattle round and linger in your head long after the screen fades to black.
