“One Battle After Another makes light of a serious issue, while lacking the satirical bite to make the audience look past the laughter. The question is if it intended to.”

“Every revolution starts off fighting demons.”

Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) are an explosive couple. She on account of her volatile personality, he because he, well, makes explosives. They are part of the French 75, which sounds like a moderately successful indie rock band, but in reality is quite a successful band of revolutionaries. Their objectives are a bit hazy, but coalesce around America’s immigration policies. These are harsh no matter what administration runs the show, and have been for decades. At one of their operations Perfidia comes face to face with Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, channeling a military-minded RFK Jr.), whose dominance by this black, curvy woman turns him on, especially when on a second encounter the dominance becomes sexual; Perfidia knows how to push this man’s buttons. But revolutionaries have a life at home too, even a wild child like Perfidia. Pregnancy can’t stop her anti-establishment ways, and Pat by necessity becomes a stay-at-home dad, while his partner is out robbing banks to finance the French 75’s operations. When one of the bank jobs goes haywire and Perfidia gets arrested, she rats out her fellow Frenchies in exchange for a spot in the witness protection program.

Cut to 16 years later, and Pat lives with his teenage daughter in the woods near the town of Baktan Cross, somewhere out west. He goes by Bob Ferguson now, and the girl is named Willa (Chase Infiniti, whose name would have gotten her into the French 75 on the spot). She is a typical teenage girl, having trivial arguments with a father whose alcohol and drug use over the years have made his brain foggy. She goes off with her friends to the high school dance, embarrassed by her dad’s tough act towards one of her mates. Then Bob gets a phone call: one of the French 75 members that was still on the loose has been arrested, and now Lockjaw is about to hit Baktan Cross to come for Bob and his daughter. Will Bob ever see his girl again?

For satire to truly have bite, the thing that it satirizes needs a certain degree of specificity. There is a moment when One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 16-year spanning revolutionary saga, hits that sweet spot, even if it’s not in one of its many comedic bits. It’s a fleeting moment, as we see armed border patrol guards walk past rows of cages filled with Hispanic children. Suddenly flashes of Donald Trump’s first presidency loom over the film like bad nightmares, and for a short time the film is ‘of the moment’, or at the very least ‘a moment’. This feeling soon dissipates again, as it becomes harder to pin down when exactly this is all supposed to have happened. That is the point. Adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which spans the period from the Nixon era to the Drug Wars of the late ’80s, the film shows that the US’s negative attitude towards immigrants has never wavered; in fact, it has only hardened. So One Battle After Another is not just a reflection of a specific moment in time like those kids in cages would suggest, but of half a century of repression and an ever-increasing militaristic approach towards immigrants.

The problem is that for this to really pack a punch, the humor in One Battle After Another (and there’s lots of it) has to have a broader butt than Penn’s Lockjaw or Tony Goldwyn’s Virgil Throckmorton, member of a cabal of highly influential businessmen who convene in shady basements dreaming of a white America. The cartoonish nature of both Penn’s performance (the actor has never been known to keep it ‘small’) and Throckmorton’s sinister club of racist masons hides the evilness and decidedly less funny side of white supremacy. These guys are a laughing matter; Stephen Miller is not. Anderson’s determination to keep the novel’s comedic tone holds it back from getting even a little under the surface of America’s flirtations with fascism and its naked racism. One Battle After Another becomes a caper, a zany comedy in which DiCaprio’s Bob is a bumbling idiot in a plaid bathrobe who keeps forgetting secret code phrases and falling off roofs trying to reunite with his daughter. The actor is in good form, playing a version of Joaquin Phoenix’s Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice (Anderson’s first Pynchon adaptation) if he was on speed instead of weed. The rest of the cast is mostly condemned to similar larger-than-life characters, including Taylor, Penn, and Benicio del Toro as Willa’s karate sensei who secretly runs an ‘underground railroad’ of sorts for undocumented Hispanic immigrants. The only two afforded more straightforward characters are newcomer Infiniti as tough cookie Willa and Regina Hall in a thankless role as an emotional anchor that the film throws out far too little.

The film in general has a problem with emotions, in particular the central bond that it tries to make the audience care for. The connection between father and daughter never develops because Anderson separates them after one scene and doesn’t reunite them until the very end, and while we logically understand Bob’s desire to find his daughter, neither the empty shell of a character that is Willa, solely defined by her grit, nor the chaotic clown that is her father can make us feel the love between them. A dramatic reveal that could upend this relationship, towards the end of the film’s second act, can be seen coming across miles of dusty desert road and falls flat because Anderson barely explores its implication. Taylor probably has the most complex and interesting character from a psychological standpoint, a blaxploitation Pam Grier avant la lettre whose battles rage just as much inside her head, but she exits the film after half an hour.

Still, missed opportunities to really dig into America’s problems with racism and white supremacy aside, One Battle After Another is damn entertaining. Despite a runtime only twenty minutes shy of three hours, the film’s length is never felt as Anderson perfectly paces the action, greatly helped by Jonny Greenwood’s metronomic, sparse score of hammering piano chords and rim shots that sound like a continuously ticking clock that is running out on Bob and Willa. It keeps the film’s energy up during the lengthy middle act, which is essentially not one battle, but one chase scene after another. Anderson saves the best for (almost) last though, staging a car chase on a road in the hilly desert of Southern California that is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Duel. While the more showy compositions from films like There Will Be Blood are absent, Anderson uses the highway roller coaster ride to great effect to build tension without dialogue, just revving engines and Greenwood’s nervous score. It’s a standout set piece with a satisfying ending, which makes it all the more disappointing that the director feels the need to give Penn’s Lockjaw an explicit send-off rather than the implicit one with which the chase ended, and makes a feeble attempt to elicit emotion trying to connect Willa to her mother. It is a minor ending to a film that was majorly entertaining, even if its humor and lack of specificity never deepened the cartoonish characters or the real problems that America is facing right now. One Battle After Another makes light of a serious issue, while lacking the satirical bite to make the audience look past the laughter. The question is if it intended to.