One Battle After Another

After a sixteen-year absence, a shadowy figure from a forgotten revolution resurfaces, pulling a weathered band of former fighters back into a high-stakes conflict. Bound by a tangled family connection, they navigate old wounds and fresh dangers in a relentless struggle against time and enemies.

One Battle After Another Review

Having spent most of the intervening years between There Will Be Blood and now directing music videos, it’s possible that Paul Thomas Anderson has forgotten how to tell a story (I didn’t see Licorice Pizza).

                   

One Battle After Another is nearly three hours of abusive and overly simplistic leftist metaphors haphazardly slapped on screen and couched in the ridiculous and clichéd fever dream of the false mythology that they’ve built around the Right. Anderson is known for his slightly exaggerated storytelling, but in One Battle, he cranks up the dial and unsuccessfully attempts to blend expressionism and realism into a loud yet narratively bland frappuccino of pretentious arthouse trash that mainstream critics will lap up like Obama’s bathwater.

His characters are obnoxious cartoons. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a useless white male loser with no personality beyond pot and panic. Think “The Wolf of Wall Street” sans personality, charisma, or utility. Benicio DelTorro made a name for himself by transforming a meaningless character (Fenster) in The Usual Suspects into the film’s most memorable one. Yet, even he can’t do anything with Anderson’s pointless script, giving us a nothing character who is there and gone before you can remember his name. The only performer who manages to make something of this waste of time is Sean Penn.

Penn plays Col. Lockjaw, a brutal martinet in charge of a contingent of militarized police/immigration enforcement officers. Place your bets now, because not only will his jungle-fevered humiliation-fetishist white supremacist earn him an Oscar nomination for this send-up of ICE agents, but unless a fat one-legged black tranny also gets nominated, he’ll win. Quite frankly, if his character weren’t such a retardedly offensive caricature of an ambitious career soldier, he’d have earned it. He’s completely invested in the brutal soldier. However, if you’ve ever seen an interview with Penn, playing a heartless d!@< with no personality doesn’t exactly seem like a stretch.

He’s a great actor, but Sean Penn is also exactly who you think he is. pic.twitter.com/VcwArVcdMN

— Worth it or Woke? (reviews) (@worthitorwoke) September 23, 2025

As it is, neither Penn’s Lockjaw nor any other character engenders any emotional connection thanks to Anderson’s political meth posing as a story. One would think that a three-hour movie would be worth a review of more than a few hundred words, but as I paced the aisles of the otherwise empty theater in pain while suffering through this monstrosity, one constant refrain echoed in my head: “Nothing is happening.” Oh, sure, characters changed locations and had conversations. Guns were fired, and cars were chased, but through all of the “and this happened nexts” one thing remained constant, I didn’t care.

Anderson needs to go back to music videos.

WOKE REPORT

DISCLAIMER:

• After about an hour, I more or less stopped taking notes on what was woke because my hands were cramping up. I was basically taking dictation by that point. So, here are some of the highlights.

Peel, Butterfly, & Tuck

• Leo’s character’s 16-year-old daughter is best friends with a skeevey, trashstache-having, lipstick-wearing lunatic who thinks that he’s an it.
  • Billed as a “Dark Comedy,” one of the film’s many thudding bits is a conversation about Bobo’s (yeah) pronouns.”

Supremacía Blanca

• The bad guys are a group of America’s most powerful white men. They are a mix of the KKK and the Illuminati—white supremacist kingmakers—called the Christmas Adventurer’s Club, who, once you’ve joined, instantly elevate you to being among the most wealthy and powerful men in the world. They run the State and are cartoonishly racist.
  • Their secret greeting is “hail Santa.”
• There is also a small gang of rural paramilitary, four-wheeler-riding, white supremacists called the 1776. They are murderers and slave traders.
• The police have been federalized and are now part of the military, holding significant authority.

One Man’s Terror

• The “good guys” are what Antifa thinks itself to be—a group of strong and diverse women leading a bunch of betacuck white guys in social-justice terrorism—only moderately capable.
• They glorify and romanticize domestic terrorism in the name of every leftist talking point.
  • In the opening scene, the group leads an armed attack on a military-controlled facility that is basically an ICE detention center.
  • Their stated goal is to have “free borders, free bodies, and [to be] free from f######g fear.
  • They are fighting against the “imperialist state and fascist regime.”
  • “F### the police!”
  • One of the horrible women yells, “We warned you about the abortion ban,” after planting a bomb.

Yo VIP, Let’s Kick It

• In addition to the ICE facility in the opening, we get a long walk-through of another one full of nothing but Central and South American children in cages.

TikTok Block

• The women in the movie are just the worst.
  • The female leaders of the terrorist group are the most arrogant and loudest “strong black” women that you’ve ever seen. They are ripped right out of social media, and, of course, the film celebrates their “strength” by giving them the cringiest dialogue and allowing them to debase men in some of the worst ways.
    • While robbing a bank, one of the diverse women of power named Jungle P###y (for real) yells, “This is what power looks like.  This is what black power looks like.”
    • The main female terrorist has (this isn’t me being lustful, it’s integral to the film) great curves, and she starts the film wearing a tight belly shirt and combat fatigue pants. Yet, we’re expected to take her seriously.
      • Once she breaks into the first ICE facility, she encounters the film’s primary antagonist, Colonel Lockjaw (subtle), played by Sean Penn. She quickly disarms him at gunpoint and proceeds to humiliate him first publicly by forcing him (again, at gunpoint) to give himself an erection. Then, she marches him in front of his men, threatening to kill him if he deflates before locking him in the same cage that once occupied women and children.
        • He likes this so much that he begins obsessing over her and manipulates her into having a tryst with him. During it, she again points a loaded gun at his head, slams him face-first against the wall, and then shoves the gun up his ammo can, which he loves. After this, he simps for her even harder.
  • The daughter is a girl boss in training. We told right off the bat, in a bit of clunky exposition, why she is so awesome. She even rescues herself at the end of the film.
• The white men in the film are either literal white supremacists, burnout goofballs, cucks, murderers, or comic relief (at least what this movie thinks is comic relief). The few male minorities are cool, heroic, and effective. Even the one criminal minority has a change of heart before the film ends.
  • After two and a half hours of avoiding capture and chasing after his kidnapped/missing teenage daughter, they don’t even let Leonardo’s otherwise completely useless character (actually useless—he serves no purpose in the narrative that couldn’t be replaced by a couple of lines) save his daughter. She, a half-minority, rescues herself.
  • Sean Penn’s Colonel is exactly what Sean Penn thinks Colonels are.
    • He wears tight shirts that show off his muscles, and at one point, the teen girl is mocking the tightness. He immediately loses it, screaming, “I’m not gay! I’m not a homosexual!”
      • The implicit joke is that he actually is latently homosexual (remember the gun) and compensates by being extra militant.
  • Leo’s daughter talks to him like a child, and he applauds it, telling her that he’s proud of her for speaking her mind.

Vouchers

• When speaking with his daughter’s nosering-wearing teacher, he tells her that it’s essential to “teach the right kind of history.” Then, he goes on to bash Ben Franklin, calling him the Grand Wizard and a slave owner.
  • He did own slaves, but he was also an abolitionist. He was even the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

Can’t Forget Religion

• Either the female leadership is now posing as nuns, are nuns, or are mixed in with real nuns (the film’s a little vague).
  • They curse, grow, and smoke weed, and are called the Sisters of the Brave Beaver