**One Battle After Another: A Perfectly Imperfect Masterpiece for Our Tumultuous Times**
I initially resisted *One Battle After Another* (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video). It’s a story about angry leftists violently opposing a not-ICE—but basically still ICE—anti-immigration military group that sows fear, chaos, abuses power, and stages riots in the streets. Given the state of our current American reality, are our nerves not already raw enough?
But my defenses crumbled as I realized director Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t interested in simplistic political screeds or button-pushing for its own sake. Loosely adapting Thomas Pynchon’s novel *Vineland*—itself inspired by the actions of Nixon-era militant Marxists, the Weather Underground—Anderson creates an ever-so-slightly heightened reality for this story of cultural and ideological turmoil. At its core, the film is anchored by a fraught but ever-loving father-daughter relationship.
*One Battle After Another* is, at once, a nerve-shredding thriller, a robust comedy, and an exhilarating action extravaganza. Is it the ultimate movie for our times? It just might be.
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### ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
**The Gist:**
Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the explosives expert of the French 75. Yes, Ghetto Pat. Characters in this movie have names like that. His girlfriend is Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), and their nemesis is Capt. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). See what I mean?
Now, how seriously can we take it when Pat, Perfidia, and a crew of heavily armed radicals take over an immigration detention center near the Mexico border to set detainees free—humiliating supervisor Lockjaw in the process? These are comic book names. They aren’t comic book situations, but portions of the film are unserious enough in their seriousness to remind us that we’re not feeling the same relentless nausea as in Alex Garland’s upsettingly probable *Civil War*. The film’s also serious enough in its unseriousness to separate it from the nihilistic “comedy” of Ari Aster’s *Eddington*.
Anyway. As the French 75 cause blackouts with bombs and rob banks to fund their cause, Pat and Perfidia’s love blooms. Lockjaw keeps an eye on Perfidia—in his very male way—on her derriere, prompting a compromise: a hotel-room tryst in exchange for Lockjaw not siccing his goons on the French 75.
That moment is immediately followed by a shot of Perfidia firing a machine gun on a range, the butt of the weapon recoiling alongside her massively pregnant belly. She gives birth to a girl. Pat wants to settle down and raise her; Perfidia isn’t so sure.
Lockjaw moves in on the French 75, and the group splinters. Perfidia is arrested and bargains her way into witness protection by ratting out the French 75. Pat and the baby go on the run. Sixteen years pass.
Now Pat is Bob Ferguson, and the girl is Willa (Chase Infiniti). They live off the grid in Baktan Cross, California. Lockjaw has become Col. Lockjaw, angling for a spot in a secret society of White men who despise people who aren’t White.
His group is still active, searching for Bob—and Willa—for reasons unstated but visually communicated clearly. Bob is a mess. His brain is fried and addled by drugs, inactivity, and paranoia. Willa somehow is strong and self-sufficient, one of the prides of Sensei Sergio’s (Benicio Del Toro) Ninja Academy—yes, a Ninja Academy—but ostensibly a typical teenager.
She chews out her dad for drinking too much and driving home. “But I know how to drink and drive, honey,” he retorts, then goes to the school dance with her and her friends.
That’s when Lockjaw strikes.
He doesn’t have the drop on Willa, though; she’s scooped up by French 75 straggler Deandra (Regina Hall), and they zoom into the desert to hide out with the Sisters of the Brave Beaver—which, frankly, is the last funny name I’ll reveal. Promise.
Meanwhile, Bob must drop everything except the old, antiquated, untraceable cell phone the French 75 gave him. In his sloppy bathrobe, he runs to Sensei Sergio, who calmly assists our panicking, idiot burnout.
Sensei Sergio provides an electrical outlet for Bob’s uncharged phone. Bob needs to contact the French 75 stronghold, who ask him for passwords that psychedelics long ago murdered and left for dead in Bob’s melted hippocampus. All Bob wants is the rendezvous point so he can reunite with Willa, his protective-dad instincts kicking into overdrive—but struggling to find purchase among his dead brain cells.
Sensei Sergio sees Lockjaw’s troops converging on Baktan Cross to stage a crackdown, so he tends to the “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” he oversees.
Things only get crazier from here for all involved parties. But amidst the chaos and constant motion, Sensei Sergio and Bob still manage to drink a few small beers. There’s never a bad time for a few small beers.
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### What Movies Will It Remind You Of?
*Weapons*.
Two righteously provocative 2025 films have steadfastly refused to be easily pigeonholed; they’ve offered precarious but absorbing tonal stews and inspired massive laughs underscored by dynamic, rousing ideas. And those films are *Weapons* and *One Battle After Another*.
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### Performances Worth Watching
This film features one standout performance after another. DiCaprio plays yet another extraordinary bumbler, and Penn is a rigid, limping, tiny-dick, stick-in-the-ass, roided-out hoo-rah—an utterly loathsome, bulldog hypocrite. Both performances are brilliant satirical characterizations teeming with unexpected depth.
Taylor scorches all in her path with her lust for action of all types. Hall serves as an underused but grounding force.
But the VIPs here are Del Toro—a walking and talking raised eyebrow of Zen-master comic brilliance—and Infiniti, who carries the emotional weight of the film with steadfast intensity.
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### Sex and Skin
There is some aggressive but mostly implied off-screen or out-of-frame action.
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### Our Take
*One Battle After Another* is a to-its-marrow American film. Anderson has crafted an invigorating, funny, upsetting, confounding, perfectly imperfect masterpiece to mirror life in this country.
Set in the past, present, and future, it provides a metaphorical, phantasmagorical, yet realistic glimpse into America’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
I speak in circles because the film’s intensity fluctuates—but the battles will keep coming, just as they did in the 1860s, 1960s, and 2020s.
The good guys do bad things, and the bad guys do bad things, while the flummoxed and inflamed majority trapped between them is tempted to be Bob Fergusons who smoke doobs, watch old movies, and never leave the house—paralyzed and sabotaging themselves and their cultural virility—hoping (key word: hoping) the children they’ve spawned possess enough gumption to make the world a better place, because they (we) have clearly failed.
One of many threads in this crazy quilt of a film tracks Willa’s coming of age as a daughter of revolutionaries and the dynamic she engages in with her increasingly hollowed-out father.
The film prompted a deep conversation between myself and a friend half my age about the generation gap and how sharp the contrast between youth and aging can be in an age of divisiveness and turmoil.
Anderson likely conceived the core relationship of *One Battle After Another* in response to being the father of mixed-race children (he has been with Maya Rudolph since 2001). But the broader idea addresses how Gen Xers are gracelessly aging out of any relevant zeitgeist, leaving a mess for their successors to squeegee off the cultural and political windshield.
Life itself is for the young, because the weary aged often have absconded it before they’ve ceased breathing.
But hope lingers.
Such is the Big Everything Anderson casts a net over with this film, knowing damn well it’s too big and unwieldy to ever contain, even in 161 minutes.
Some will see it as inherently political and be disappointed; some will be roused or infuriated by its verisimilitude or perceived lack thereof. Functionally, it’s a shattered looking glass: you see shards reflecting your own political, social, and personal ideologies back at you.
On another level, it’s a propulsive, hilarious action film with set pieces that push Anderson toward crowd-pleasing.
A steadicam run through Sensei Sergio’s interconnected community roots our perspective in Bob’s bewilderment, and a climactic car chase set on a rolling-hill desert highway will raise every hair on your body—all while Jonny Greenwood’s skittery, nervy score keeps you on edge.
*One Battle After Another* is as explosive as things—films, life, everything—get.
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### Our Call: STREAM IT
A perfectly imperfect masterpiece.
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*John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.*
https://decider.com/2025/11/14/one-battle-after-another-stream-it-or-skip-it/
