What unfolds on screen is one battle after another, stitched together into a disjointed revolutionary tale that comes across like delusionary story held together by dry spaghetti.
To begin with, the film simply did not need to be this long. And because it insists on its length, it also insists on stuffing itself with forced political signaling:
The Christmas Adventurers Club a stupid name of a group of white supremacists, an over the top looking transgender character because all kids have a transgender friend, and a politically correct revolutionary on the phone with Bob, become offended by language while asking Bob for a code word for, “what times is it?”
None of these elements feel earned or moved the story. They feel jammed into the story like square blocks forced into a round hole.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a drunkard, pothead is lackluster. He has film presents as he does in all his films but that’s all. No depth or layers.
Sean Penn fares no better as Lockjaw, a military hardliner whose defining characteristic appears as a stereotypical angry combat officer. He would have been more interesting as the trans character in the closet.
Penn overacts the role, stomping through scenes, screaming through other scenes with such exaggerated intensity that it feels less like he’s on autopilot, walking through his role.
Instead of grounding the film, the performance becomes another distraction.
The daughter Willie, played by Chase Infiniti was another character without any depth or life. We as the audience never get to know who she is.
That’s the most frustrating part, this could have been an interesting film. There could be a version of this story that works. But the filmmakers seem unwilling to trust the audience or the material without pushing a current political narrative alongside it.
If that’s what I wanted, I could have watched Heated Rivalry, which bills itself as the story of two men on a hockey team who fall in love, essentially Brokeback Mountain on skates.
By the time the final action sequence arrived, I was struggling to stay awake. The stakes on screen mattered less to me than the stray thought running through my head about whether Leonardo DiCaprio was sleeping with his co-star. That’s not engagement, that’s distraction.
I expected more out of Paul Thomas Anderson, with his track record of films.
If you have three hours to burn and absolutely nothing else to do, you could watch it. Or you could put on Seinfeld reruns and still laugh at jokes that actually earned their place.
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Chu The Cud 