Spoiler Warning: There are some major spoilers for One Battle After Another below. If you haven’t watched the 2025 movie, please exercise extreme caution.
There have been a great number of riveting father and child movies over the years, ones that perfectly capture the beauty, joy, and important lessons of parenthood. Then there are movies like There Will Be Blood, which center on the most deranged, manipulative, and downright evil fathers, especially when it comes to Daniel Plainview. For years, I’ve been convinced that Daniel Day-Lewis’ oil mogul in the amazing Paul Thomas Anderson movie was as bad as it could get.
That is, until I watched One Battle After Another. This movie is seriously great, but it has a first ballot hall of shamer when it comes to Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. Penn deserves all the praise and his Golden Globe nomination, but this character makes Plainview look like a decent guy by comparison.
For Years, I’ve Been Convinced Daniel Plainview Was As Bad As It Could Get
It has been 18 years since I first saw There Will Be Blood on the big screen, and ever since then (a little less than half of my life at the time of this writing), I’ve been convinced no dad could be as rotten, cruel, or opportunistic as Daniel Plainview. A man with questionable, at best, business tactics, a pure hatred for the common man, and a drive to have control of everything, no matter the cost, Plainview uses, abuses, and casts aside those around him when they no longer serve a purpose to him.
This includes his son, H.W. Plainview (Dillon Freasier), a young orphan he adopts after the child’s father is killed in a mining accident. Though there is an argument to be made for the elder Plainview initially caring for the boy (he has a handful of tender moments), there’s an even stronger case to be made for the oilman using the child as a marketing tactic when finding new leases. Once H.W. loses his hearing following another accident, he is eventually sent off to live in a boarding school for the hearing-impaired. Cast away, so that Daniel can focus on what matters most: oil, fortune, power!
He Didn’t Kill (Or Try To Kill) His Son, But Let’s Not Forget The ‘Bastard From A Basket Scene’
Though it isn’t H.W. Plainview who’s on the receiving end of one of the bowling pins in There Will Be Blood’s shocking final scene, the older version of Plainview’s son (played by Russell Harvard) does get a tongue lashing from his deranged, obsessive, and brutally violent father. A few minutes before Day-Lewis’ character utters one of the most iconic movie lines of the 21st century, the aging oil man and all-around bad dad, unleashes an antagonistic barrage of comments about his son’s childhood. Calling him a “bastard from a basket,” first through an interpreter, and then again as he’s walking away (adding “just a little piece of competition” to really drive home the point).
We never know if this is the final meeting between father and son, but I have a feeling H.W. wouldn’t want anything to do with his father after this bitter meeting. Then there’s the whole “my dad killed a preacher with a bowling pin” angle that follows.
Before I put a pin in the awfulness of Plainview, one subtle aspect of this father-son relationship that I’ve always noticed is the fact that the oilman never bothered to learn sign language to communicate with his son, instead opting for an interpreter even after all those years.
Then I Watched One Battle After Another And Met Steven Lockjaw
After spending the past 18 years thinking Plainview was the worst movie dad, or at least when it comes to fathers from Paul Thomas Anderson movies, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw entered the picture. Though it’s not confirmed until the wild final act of the movie that the racist, violent, and generally unpleasant man who walks like he has a literal stick up his butt is the biological father of Chase Infiniti’s Willa Ferguson/Charlene Calhoun, it’s heavily implied that he’s the one who got Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills pregnant before the big 16-year time jump.
From the first time we meet this truly unhinged lunatic (talk about rising to the occasion), this guy is a pure menace, a force of chaotic evil who’ll do anything and everything to complete his mission. Time, distance, money…nothing gets between this guy and what he wants. First, it’s finding Perfidia after their unsettling first encounter. Then, later on, it’s finding the girl who may or may not be his daughter. However, it’s not about catching up after all these years.
This Guy Orchestrated An Entire Military Operation To Find And Kill His Daughter So A Super-Racist Cabal Wouldn’t Find Out
If someone were to tell me at the beginning of the year that one of 2025’s best movies would center on a raging lunatic who orchestrates a military operation so that he can find and kill his biracial daughter before a super-racist cabal called the Christmas Adventurers Club finds out and doesn’t let him join, I’d be confused. Yet, here I am in December with One Battle After Another being one of my favorites. And yeah, that’s pretty much Lockjaw’s story throughout this nearly three-hour thriller.
I had a glimmer of hope that Lockjaw wouldn’t be entirely bad and that he was simply just trying to find and reconnect with his daughter after 16 years. Then I thought maybe he was trying to find her and shield her from the Christmas Adventurers Club. Nope on both fronts. Instead, this guy tried to have his daughter killed and wipe away any trace of her so his white supremacist buddies wouldn’t think less of him. Talk about a double-whammy of bad parenting.
At least Leonardo DiCaprio’s Pat Calhoun/Bob Ferguson, who thought Willa was his daughter for the past decade-and-a-half, loved the teenager with all of his heart. His memory was kind of wonky from all the drug use and explosives, but we can’t fault him for that. “Rocketman” was a stand-up guy in my book. Can’t say the same for old Lockjaw…
One Battle After Another, with its terrible and not-so-terrible dads, is streaming for anyone with an HBO Max subscription. Maybe it’s time to revisit this one.