Leonardo DiCaprio stars in a huge, violent, hilarious blockbuster

Unrelenting drive powers director Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling, violent, sweaty, vulgar and invigorating new movie “One Battle After Another.”

Its adrenaline-junkie characters, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s paranoid Bob, keep charging ahead as restless images both beautiful and hellish never pause to take in the western scenery. 

Even its title reeks of burning rubber on asphalt. 

That non-stop, speed-demon forward motion could be why, at nearly three hours, the ambitious film never gets bogged down by its daunting length. “Battle” is simultaneously a marathon and a sprint. At the end I wasn’t tired — I was out of breath.

Gripping stuff, not to mention ginormous. These days, movies this big tend to have the words bat, spider, super and man on top of the poster. 

Also, regrettably, ant. 

Anderson fuses the scale of the comic-book blockbusters we’re all sick of with the bold, fresh ideas and the kind of magnetic, fleshed-out, appealingly strange folks that have become his calling card. 

It’s a shame that in 2025, a writer-director’s claim to fame can be strong plots and well-crafted characters. But c’est la vie.

The sharp mind behind “There Will Be Blood” and “Boogie Nights” has also never shied away from controversy (cough, “Licorice Pizza,” couch). And aspects of his explosive action-drama-comedy hybrid will surely rile up some people. 

Take Bob (DiCaprio). Nicknamed Rocket Man, he’s a vigilante justice warrior who empties out immigration detention centers on the US-Mexico border and bombs banks and courthouses alongside his gun-totin’ revolutionaries who call themselves the French 75.     

“This is a declaration of war!,” they yell. “We’re here to right your wrongs, motherf–ker!”

They are essentially domestic terrorists.

What’d I tell you?

While the band of rebels are wacky and swear so much they’d make David Mamet blush, the movie treats them with moral complexity. It is not preachy whatsoever.

When Bob’s girlfriend and mother of his kid, who goes by the call sign Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), is caught by cops, she rats on her pals, and Bob and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti, a real talent) are forced into hiding with new identities for 16 years. 

Welcome to “Leo Miserables.”

After the jump, “Battle” goes from a bombs-away, political heist movie into a juicy, snarling revenge thriller. Smoothly, too. Bob and Willa are pursued, Javert-style, by a boot-camp-officer-ish military man who, back in the old days, became obsessed with Perfidia and forced her to have sex with him.

That memorable freak’s hilarious name is like something out of Charles Dickens — Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. And a feral Sean Penn, appearing to be 90% leather, gives the creepy colonel an absolutely nutso, frightening performance. What exactly fuels Lockjaw’s laser-focused mission is an entertaining question to untangle throughout.

In the intervening years, Lockjaw’s nemesis, Bob, has devolved into a goateed survivalist who lives in the woods and doesn’t let his teenager own a phone. 

Dirty, dingy DiCaprio twitches and his eyes dart around like a rodent, prepared for the inevitable day the tiny family is found out. Chaotic, untrusting Bob is a throwback to DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes in “The Aviator” — the Hughes of the second half anyway — only without the billions and with lots of pot and guns. 

The determined dad is helped out by Sergio (Benicio del Toro), a local dojo’s chilled-out sensei with a secret. Anderson loves giving his people weird professions, and del Toro’s “it’ll all be fine!” sense of humor lightens the heavy load.

Fleeing to safety, Willa gets a lifeline from Deandra (Regina King), an on-the-lamb French 75 member she can trust.

I wasn’t totally sold on a sinister-yet-funny side plot that concerns a hidden society of racists Lockjaw wants to be a member of called the Christmas Adventurers Society. 

Their “SNL”-level greeting, “Hail, Saint Nick!,” gets a hearty laugh. And the ugly group is essential to the movie’s wrap-up. But it’s also one of “Battle”’s looser and less-thoughtful threads.

We don’t learn enough about them.  

When the film reaches its volcanic grand finale, Anderson throws in a brilliant chase scene through the desert that is bound to become a cinema classic. 

The two cars dizzingly speed up and down rolling dunes, disappearing behind them and reappearing on top. Where is he? Where is she? The tense visual suspense Anderson builds is borderline Hitchcockian, and the jaw-dropping, sloping sands would get a nod of approval from David Lean.

With this visionary director — one of Hollywood’s best — it’s one winner after another.