Leonardo DiCaprio at the film's premiere

Source: RON RAFFETY

One Battle After Another is a brainless but fun action comedy by Paul Thomas Anderson, who has a penchant for coming up with bad titles for good movies, like his There Will Be Blood. Even in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, this slapdash tale of a gang of 1970s-style leftist terrorists has been attracting insanely bloodthirsty reviews from ecstatic critics. For instance, Ty Burr exclaims in The Washington Post:

Some movies come along at exactly the moment they’re needed…. [A] strike team of radical activists descends on a border detainment facility by night. They corral the soldiers on duty into a cage at gunpoint, cut the chains holding the gates closed and herd more than 100 men, women and children into a waiting truck to be whisked off to a sanctuary city. The most ferocious member of the crew is a striking Black woman; her White boyfriend [Leonard DiCaprio] is the demolitions expert charged with setting off diversionary explosions…. Whether or not you agree with the tactics of the French 75…it’s bracing to see an overt act of resistance at this particular juncture in American history.

The French 75? What kind of name is that for Marxist bank robbers? (Like everything in P.T. Anderson movies, it’s borrowed from another movie: It’s the name of a cocktail served at Rick’s Café in Casablanca.)

Similarly, Manohla Dargis exults in The New York Times:

There are few filmmakers working today who are as skilled as Anderson, and fewer still who could—with the image of a heavily pregnant Black revolutionary firing a machine gun—create a cry from the heart that’s also a crystallizing image of resistance. It’s one for the ages, wild and thrilling, and every bit as American as the red, white and blue.

In the actual movie, however, DiCaprio’s character looks appalled by his girlfriend recklessly endangering their unborn child in the manner that so excites the NYT critic. Anderson has four children with longtime Saturday Night Live favorite Maya Rudolph. I strongly doubt that Maya practiced tommy-gunning the pigs while pregnant.

Anderson isn’t an intellectual, he’s a creative showman. Not surprisingly, he’s less enthusiastic for leftist murderers than are many of his brainier admirers. For instance, he depicts the terrorists as immediately snitching on one another when arrested.

“Director Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t an intellectual, he’s a creative showman.”

One Battle After Another adroitly rips off Guy Movie classics like The Big Lebowski, Duel (Steven Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie of the week car chase classic), The Road Warrior, Terminator, Dr. Strangelove, and Goodfellas. The density of somewhat familiar but still cool scenes successfully distracts with sheer velocity from the gifted writer-director’s long-running flaw: He can seldom make up plots that are both engaging and plausible, but he is too egomaniacal to pay a professional script doctor to do it for him.

In his previous film, Licorice Pizza, an exercise in 1973 San Fernando Valley nostalgia (PTA grew up a couple of miles from me in the Valley, so I’m biased in his favor in his rivalry with Quentin Tarantino, the Pride of the South Bay), Anderson tried to outdo Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In response to his long-running inability to invent good stories, he borrowed some amusing anecdotes told to him by Tom Hanks’ business partner. But the movie sputtered due to the auteur’s failure to come up with a story arc to tie them together.

Most PTA movies are slow-paced, so you have plenty of time to notice the plot holes. The best scene in Licorice Pizza, though, was an uncharacteristically thrilling stunt-driving sequence backing a truck down the steep north side of the Hollywood Hills. Presumably, audiences’ delighted reaction to this Buster Keaton-style mechanical wizardry inspired Anderson to finally realize that because he’s better at the technical aspects of moviemaking than at coming up with something profound to say, he ought to make an action film.

As for the premise of One Battle After Another, it is basically high-quality Big Lebowski fan fiction.

Do you remember when the Dude (Jeff Bridges) boasts to Maude (Julianne Moore) about his 1960s radical past?

“I was, uh, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement…the original Port Huron Statement. Not the compromised second draft. And then I, uh… Ever hear of the Seattle Seven? That was me and, uh, six other guys.”

Well, even if you’ve forgotten, Paul Thomas Anderson remembers everything in every movie he’s ever seen.

By the way, the Port Huron Statement was the 1962 charter of the radical Students for a Democratic Society, while the Seattle Seven were a real-life minor-league version of the Chicago Seven. Among the Seattle Seven members tried for inciting a riot at the U. of Washington in 1970 was Jeff Dowd, the Coens’ friend who was the model for the Dude.

But the Coen brothers didn’t go anywhere with El Duderino’s leftist past because that would raise the obvious question of why his best friend in 1991 is unhinged right-winger Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), perhaps the single most memorable supporting character in movie history. I mean, would you write Walter Sobchak out of your screenplay just to plausibly fill in His Dudeness’ past?

So, Anderson has now made up a movie in which the Dude is the explosives expert for a 1970s-style Symbionese Liberation Army-style mixed-race guerrilla gang. And he got Leonardo DiCaprio to play Jeff Bridges’ character.

After a first act of robbing banks, blowing up power lines, and, implausibly, liberating detained illegal immigrants from South of the Border (which in real life would be the absolute lowest priority of black radicals), One Battle After Another then skips sixteen years ahead to the present, where DiCaprio and his lovely teenage daughter by his black terrorist girlfriend, who has vanished to “Cuba or Algiers,” are living incognito, with our protagonist doing nothing but smoking weed and watching The Battle of Algiers.

For a while, the movie then turns into an extended version of one of those countless TV commercials with a dumb white dad and his smart mulatto daughter that so amazed Joe Biden in 2021: “And I don’t know how many commercials you’ll see…two to three out of five have mixed-race couples in them. That’s not by accident. They’re selling soap, man!”

Still, although we’ve seen it all before, it is DiCaprio playing the Dumb Dad.

Leo might turn out to be the Last Great Movie Star. After all, movie stars these days, with the exception of Timothée Chalamet, are old. For instance, in this film, the three stars are DiCaprio who is now 50, Benicio del Toro at 58, and Sean Penn at 65.

But wait a minute, you might well be asking: Back up a moment. The present is 2025, so then sixteen years ago was…2009, the first year of the Obama administration? You may not recall Weather Underground-type leftist terrorists running amok in 2009. But film critics aren’t good at mental arithmetic, so they’ve responded to Kirk’s murder by praising PTA’s goofy movie as the film we all need now.

Then Sean Penn shows up out of their past as right-wing martinet Col. Steven Lockjaw, a mentally defective version of Sterling Hayden’s Col. Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. Penn turned in a classic comedy performance 43 years ago as surfer Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but has he been funny since? Penn, evidently still hitting the steroids, is repulsive in a terrible role with no good lines until the end, when Anderson has him riff on Ripper’s “precious bodily fluids” speech. Much as it pains me to say this as a loyal son of the San Fernando Valley, but Penn really needs Tarantino to write him one last good role in his ever-narrowing wheelhouse.

Much more fun than Penn is Benicio del Toro playing an unflappable human trafficker (but the good kind of human trafficker—he deals in illegal aliens, you see) who helps DiCaprio escape for poorly explained reasons.

The movie winds up on the road for a series of entertaining stunts. DiCaprio is, among his many strengths as a movie star, a fine physical comedian in bumbling mode—recall his quaalude-damaged Jordan Belfort crawling back to his Lamborghini in Wolf of Wall Street. Not surprisingly, he’s terrific as the Dude 2.0, even though the auteur can’t keep straight whether his hero is a drug-damaged incompetent or if he’s suddenly a crack-shot assassin.

It’s almost as if Paul Thomas Anderson cares more about movies than politics, unlike his admirers in the critical press.