Mainstream critics have been falling all over themselves to praise the political action thriller “One Battle After Another,” but their fawning hasn’t been enough to help the film break even at the box office.
Many conservatives balked at the storyline, especially as instances of real-life violence against federal immigration agents continue.
“One Battle After Another” stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, a former far-left revolutionary living off-grid in a state of stoned paranoia, but he is forced to return to his old lifestyle when his daughter disappears. Bob teams up with his old crew of comrades to save his daughter and the world from a cabal of right-wing antagonists portrayed as racists. The leftists resort to violence in their mission, raising questions about whether their actions reflect genuine heroism or simply serve as a vehicle for political messaging.
The film is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, per The Daily Mail.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson, an 11-time Oscar nominee, went all in with the budget, spending a whopping $175 million to bring the story to life. But so far it’s only earned back $100 million and came in second place last weekend behind Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl: The Official Release Party.”
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“This movie has a chance of getting to profitability if it lasts long enough in theaters and/or overperforms abroad,” David A. Gross, head of box office intelligence firm Franchise Entertainment Research, told Variety.
“It’s going to get a lot of award nominations, but that’s two to three months away and unlikely to help this immediate release,” he added.
This is despite “One Battle” having a 95% critical rating and 85% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. While major critics gush that the movie “represents a cinema of big swings and bold statements,” many conservatives are saying it’s just more left-wing propaganda from Hollywood.
“You can make excuses for it, but basically the [film is] an apologia for radical left-wing terrorism, that’s what it is,” Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro said, also predicting it will win “all the Academy Awards” because of who it presents as heroes and villains.
“It has the subtlety of a brick … The basic suggestion is a conspiracy theory in which the United States is run by white supremacist Christian nationalists and all people of color and a few nice incompetent fellow travelers like [DiCaprio’s character] are going to take on that entire system,” Shapiro went on.
“And that system must be taken on at the cost of family, at the cost of friendship, at the cost of decency, at the cost of basic human capacity for success. It is better, in other words, to be a complete loser who wastes your life bombing things randomly in order to free illegal immigrants to run willy-nilly across the border than to be a productive citizen.”