One Battle After Another (2025)

P.T. Anderson is back with another Thomas Pynchon story, but I can actually remember this one a few hours after watching it, unlike the last time.

Sean Penn, who now looks suspiciously like Superchunk's Mac McCaughan, has a mighty odd stick-up-the-ass military walk and a kink for black women. He also wants to join a hyper-conservative right-wing christmas-themed christian military cult, who wear cable knit sweaters and generally don't care for the shades of skin color darker than "eggshell," so Penn has to keep his side interests to himself.

Ghetto Pat (Leo DiCaprio) is an over-excited demolitions dude in an underground pro-immigrant left-wing violent terrorist organization, the French 75. His hyper-horny terrorist girlfriend Perfidia Beverley Hills gets knocked up, but refuses to let parenthood get in the way of her violent social activism. Unfortunately, she keeps getting caught by Colonel Lockjaw (Penn), who keeps letting her escape in exchange for fulfilling his secret kink.

Perfidia accidentally escalates to murder and flees the country, and Leo emergency retires and moves to the desert to be a paranoid, single, stoner dad. All is fine and the daughter, Willa, grows up to be a reasonable teenager, but Sean Penn gets invited to the christmas cult and–realizing that he might be the father of mixed-race Willa from one of those sexual favors–decides it's best to deploy a massive militarized anti-immigration force (i.e. ICE) as cover to find and dispose of her.

Stoner Leo runs to Willa's karate coach, way-too-cool-for-school Benicio del Toro, for help. Benicio, cool as the coolest of cucumbers, calmly walks around arranging the illegal asylum of dozens of immigrants and getting hyper-panicked Leo a gun, which Leo immediately loses. Leo has several angry fights over the telephone with the French 75 customer service representative. One thing leads to another, and Benicio and Leo are driving drunk through the desert and Leo has to leap from the moving car and hot wire a ricer for perhaps the best filmed car chase scene in movie history. Motion sickness pills are advised.

The French 75 drive the girl to the desert to live with nuns. Penn is driving around the desert with ICE looking for the girl, Leo is driving around the desert in a ricer looking for the girl, a christmas cultist is driving a classic Mustang around the desert looking for the girl, and a native american bounty hunter is driving around the desert looking for the girl. They generally cross each other's paths, and generally kill each other violently.

It's incredibly well-made and acted and written and everything, but it's also incredibly the-politics-of-the-united-states-of-america-in-mid-twenty-twenty-five. Does it make any sense to non-Americans now? No, not really. Will it make any sense to Americans in a few years time? One certainly hopes not. It has about the same message and level of political subtlety as Don't Look Up, except it is much better written.