Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another isn’t just a movie. It’s a Molotov cocktail disguised as a family drama, a political action film that blows up its genre conventions with the fervor of a revolutionary nun. Leonardo DiCaprio, in a dual role as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun and Bob Ferguson, is a man so worn down by ideology that he can barely recall the password to his own past. The film starts with bombings and ends with a protest. Yet, the real explosions occur in the moral fog between left and right, where Anderson creates a carnival of hypocrisy, betrayal, and bureaucratic absurdity.
The French 75, a leftist group named after a World War I artillery piece and a cocktail, are not heroes. They are passionate, reckless, and occasionally incompetent. Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) is their queen of chaos, seducing her enemies and abandoning her child with equal fervor. Her lover Pat, later Bob, is a man who builds bombs and bedtime stories with the same trembling hands. Their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) inherits the revolutionary impulse, but not the delusion that purity exists. She is the film’s beating heart, a teenager raised in tunnels and karate studios, who learns that every movement has its price.
On the other side, Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) is a fascist with a fetish, a man who climbs the ranks of the U.S. military while hiding his interracial past and his daughter’s existence. His Christmas Adventurers Club is a white supremacist secret society that smells of peppermint and genocide. Anderson does not flatter either side. The French 75 bomb power grids and forget their own children. The Adventurers’ members gas themselves and host meetings in bunkers that resemble suburban rec rooms. Both groups are obsessed with purity, secrecy, and violence. Both are willing to sacrifice the innocent for the cause. Both are, under the skin, morally identical.
Anderson’s genius lies in refusing to choose sides. He stages shootouts in convents, raids at school dances, and escapes through bedroom tunnels. He gives us revolutionary nuns, bounty hunters with hearts, and karate senseis who drive getaway cars. The film is absurd, but never unserious. It is comic, but never trivial. It is a manifesto written in lipstick and blood.
The title One Battle After Another is not metaphorical. It is literal. Every scene is a skirmish—between lovers, ideologies, generations, and identities. The film never settles. It lurches forward, propelled by paranoia and hope. Bob’s inability to remember the hotline password is emblematic of the film’s thesis: revolutions forget their own codes. Movements lose their children. Fathers become fugitives. Daughters become symbols.
As a political action movie, it is wildly effective. It refuses catharsis. It offers no clean victories. It ends with a protest, not a resolution. Willa walks into the crowd, armed with her mother’s letter and her father’s blessing. She is not redeemed. She is not safe. She is ready.
Is it hit and miss? Of course. Some scenes collapse under their own weight. Some characters vanish without explanation. But Anderson embraces the chaos. He knows revolutions are messy. He knows ideology is a costume party with real bullets. He knows that loneliness is the price of clarity.
DiCaprio is magnificent. Penn is monstrous. Taylor is electric. Del Toro is the film’s conscience. The supporting cast—Regina Hall, Alana Haim, Wood Harris, Shayna McHayle—form a chorus of the disillusioned. They do not sing. They scream.
This is a film for our times. In an era of anti-immigrant bias, surveillance, and ideological extremism, One Battle After Another reminds us that the left and right are often mirror images, distorted by fear and desire. It is a film that laughs at purity and mourns its victims. It is a film that dares to say: the revolution is lonely.
Grade: B+.
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