The 2023 political thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a small production with no household-name movie stars and limited theatrical distribution. It vocalized leftist politics within the visual language of a mainstream heist thriller, often pausing its most explosive moments to explain the political motivations of its young domestic-terrorist dissidents, who actively disrupt the industrial processing of oil as a desperate act of global self-defense in the face of Climate Change. Despite all of its populist genre markers and its traditional Dad Movie rhythms, it didn’t make much of a cultural impact outside the usual cinephile circles. What it did accomplish, though, was presenting a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, dreaming of a better world for the American moviegoer and the American political discourse. And now, somehow, one of the last few Hollywood studios standing has put some real money behind making the real thing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the finished action-blockbuster product that How to Blow Up a Pipeline only sketched out in blueprint, one with real Hollywood money and recognizable Hollywood celebrities vocalizing revolutionary politics within the structure of a 4-quadrant crowdpleaser. It’s in no more danger of transforming the real-life American political landscape than its low-budget indie prototype was a couple years ago, but it does have a much better chance of provoking substantial political conversations among a wide, mainstream audience, because it’s got major studio muscle behind its production & distribution — improbably.

If there’s any glaring deviation from the traditional Hollywood studio action thriller here, it’s in One Battle‘s choice to de-center its archetypal lone hero to instead give credit to the heroic work of political collectives. Much like Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling stoner detective in Anderson’s previous Thomas Pynchon adaptation, 2014’s Inherent Vice, Leonardo DiCaprio’s revolutionary burnout is continually ineffective in his attempts to save the day; he’s mostly just thrashed about by political systems larger than him as he drinks & smokes his way through the pain. At the start of the picture, he’s a young bombmaker who’s joined a political resistance collective called The French 75, helping them destroy property and free prisoners of the state in the name of a future America with “free borders, free bodies, free choices, and [freedom] from fucking fear.” However, after he fathers a child with the most erratic radical in the crew (Teyana Taylor), his politics become secondary to his domestic duties as a parent. His girlfriend splits the scene and the French 75 fall apart spectacularly under the pressure of a militant fascist named Lockjaw (Sean Penn), leaving DiCaprio’s stoner dad raising his daughter alone under a stolen identity, separated from any meaningful political resistance in his middle age. He’s only dragged back into action by the abduction of the mostly oblivious teen in his care (relative newcomer Chase Infiniti), who becomes a pawn in a three-way battle between an ICE-like immigration taskforce run by Lockjaw, the remnant scraps of the surviving French 75ers, and a secret white nationalist cabal that wields more political power than anyone else involved.

A lot of the humor in One Battle After Another‘s action sequences is a result of its would-be hero’s complete lack of heroic skills. He’s long scorched away the political rhetoric & secret passcodes from his early revolutionary days with decades of bong rips, and the countless gallons of beer have left him too sluggish to keep up in the endless string of chase sequences. When tasked to attempt small parkour maneuvers following skaters to safety during a police chase, for instance, he falls 40 feet to the ground and is immediately tasered unconscious. All of the meaningful political action in the film is executed by underground networks of revolutionaries working as a collective, including one run by a karate dojo owner played by Benicio del Toro, who helps him limp along for much longer than he possibly could otherwise. At his age, DiCaprio’s revolutionary is mostly a dad whose mission is to retrieve his daughter before she’s harmed by a fascistic government he failed to change for the better in his own youth. Even in that context, he has little effect on the outcome, pathetically so. That’s largely because the right-wing forces he’s racing to keep up with are so absurdly evil and well-funded that a paunchy, middle-aged stoner has no chance to make a dent in their armor. Sean Penn is especially grotesque as Lockjaw, continually finding new, inhuman ways to hold his body & mouth that are just as worthy of laughter as they are of disgust. The racist cabal that calls the shots above Lockjaw’s head are also presented as a hilarious punchline despite their vicious cruelty, as they’re characterized as a Christmas cult that chants, “Hail, St. Nick!” with the same ecstatic fervor that their imagined enemies chant, “Hail, Satan!”

I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio spectacle at this point in my life; the most potent images & ideas in modern cinema are lurking in microbudget indies that would be lucky to secure 1% of One Battle‘s speculated budget. Still, it’s encouraging to know the modern studio picture can be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people. Paul Thomas Anderson announced himself as a skilled craftsman as soon as he debuted with Hard Eight & Boogie Nights in the 1990s. His immediate Altmanesque control on large ensemble casts and his Scorsese-inspired tension between humor & violence have only become more personal to his own name & style as his work has sprawled over the decades since. Here, he acknowledges that the revolution will not be televised (going as far as to reduce that infamous Gil Scott-Heron piece to call center hold music), but he also argues that the revolution can be sexy & fun anyway. For all of the sparse piano-key tension of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the restless kineticism of Michael Bauman’s bulky VistaVision camerawork, the tone remains remarkably light. These revolutionaries cut up, they fuck, and they celebrate their minor victories with wild, infectious abandon. Before Anderson funnels all of the plot’s political warfare into a single highway chase on an open desert road, the audience would be forgiven for forgetting that we’re watching an action thriller and not an ensemble-cast character comedy. What’s most impressive about the movie is that it credibly succeeds in both genres while making time to clearly define the nation’s current political factions: our cartoonishly racist overlords, their pathetically naive servants who hope to join their ranks, the largely disorganized leftist resistance, and the ill-equipped everyday people struggling to just take care of their own despite the boots pressing on all of our necks.

-Brandon Ledet