Any director hoping to arouse the action audience for a new movie might want to come up with a more kickass title than "One Battle After Another." But that's what Paul Thomas Anderson has settled on for his latest film, which is loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel "Vineland" (an even less tantalizing title possibility). The picture has a couple of things to recommend it, chiefly a strong performance by actress Chase Infiniti, making her feature debut; a distinctive score (heavy on plinks and plonks) by Anderson regular Jonny Greenwood; and some novel photographic effects the director has worked out with cinematographer Michael Bauman, a veteran lighting specialist taking over DP duties for the first time. (There's an extended sequence of a car escaping down a rolling highway that suggests a warship cresting swells out on the bounding main.)

But the movie is diminished by its baggy runtime (two hours and 41 minutes) and the ambiguity of its time frame. Pynchon's book, set in 1984, smack in the middle of the post-hippie Reagan years, harked back to the freewheeling radicalism of the 1960s. Dispensing with this connection, Anderson's movie bids instead for contemporary political relevance. So we see that immigrant detention centers were long ago set up on the virtuous side of the U.S.-Mexican border and that the young warriors of a militant group called the French 75 (why they've named themselves after a high-end champagne cocktail is anybody's guess) fought back against government oppression with automatic weapons and, like the Weathermen of the 1970s, bank bombings. Sixteen years later (now?), we find the aging survivors of that anti-fascist moment still entangled with the past.

The picture begins back in the day, introducing us to a military megalomaniac with the overwrought moniker of Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). We also meet dope-smoking Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio in a measly ponytail) and his warrior girlfriend Perfidia Beverly Hills (a suitably grim Teyana Taylor). Ferguson is well served by DiCaprio, who dials down his natural charisma to play this semi-loser. Lockjaw, on the other hand, is a problematic character, eliciting from Penn one of his most preposterous performances. (The colonel, with his sour disposition and severe whitewall haircut, is such a cliche warmonger that when Perfidia calls him a "dickhead," he becomes visibly aroused.)

Lockjaw and Ferguson and Perfidia drift into an erotic triangle that eventually results in a baby being born and growing up to become a formidable young woman named Willa (Infiniti, who brings a martial arts background of her own to the role). The plot is powered by the question of who fathered Willa — was it Bob or was it the hissable Lockjaw? Apart from that, there are the doings of Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who operates a rescue service for on-the-run immigrants. Unsurprisingly, there's also a sketchy group of racist Christian nationalists calling themselves — who knows why? — the Christmas Adventurers' Club. (Standard greeting: "All hail Saint Nick!") And finally, very briefly, an order of marijuana-growing nuns who call themselves the Sisters of the Brave Beaver?

The movie's dated sense of pothead absurdity and its entirely standard-issue political posture are tritely familiar. ("Each and every day is hand-to-hand combat in the battle against uncontrolled immigration," says one dastardly character.) At the end, the movie's targets, ripe for bold satire as they may be, remain largely untouched.