I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that I was completely won over by One Battle After Another. I went from chuckling at the memes-turned-unofficial-marketing-campaign, to being swayed by the overwhelming word of mouth surrounding it, to now looking forward to its potential sweep at the 2026 Oscars.
There’s a lot about One Battle After Another that hasn’t left my brain: Chase Infiniti’s star-making performance, the absurd coolness of Benicio del Toro’s Sensei, and the hilarity of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson yelling on the phone. But there is one component that has all but burrowed itself into my psyche, to the point where I will randomly think about it and start laughing out loud: the way Sean Penn’s Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw walks in this movie.
**Spoilers for One Battle After Another*
Lockjaw is a character whose significance in One Battle After Another kind of sneaks up on you. Based on the marketing, I had absolutely no clue what personal connection he would have (if any) to the members of the French 75 resistance group, or if he would just be a dangerous government stooge tasked with taking them down. As we learn early on in the movie, the latter is far from the case: after falling in love with Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), he initially turns a blind eye to the French 75’s anarchy in exchange for her having sex with him.
In the present day, as Lockjaw sets his sights on Perfidia’s daughter Willa (Infiniti) and former lover Bob, his motivations begin to be unveiled like the peeling of an onion. At first, it seems like he just wants to hunt down the remaining members of the French 75. Then, we learn that he’s actually trying to get inducted into the “Christmas Adventurers”, an ultra-secret society of white supremacists. And eventually, we learn that Lockjaw suspects Willa is his biological daughter from his time with Perfidia, and wants to kill her so his record with the Christmas Adventurers is clean. A paternity test confirms that this is the case, and chaos ensues from there.
What a wild choice…
Now, let’s get to Lockjaw’s walk. In some scenes or shots, it could just easily be mistaken for a military man’s gait, or overlooked altogether because there is just so much happening moment to moment. But as One Battle After Another goes on, it is impossible to miss… and almost impossible to describe. People online have found eloquent ways to do so, saying that he moves as if he “had a wedgie”, “has a stick up his ass”, “sh*t his pants”, or is “a velociraptor that just turned human 5 minutes before the movie starts.” So many comparisons have been made to extremely problematic WWE co-founder Vince McMahon, which you honestly can’t unsee once you realize it. There are already TikToks of people recreating it while walking down the street.
It’s a creative decision that has, honestly, become enigmatic to me since I watched the movie. How did Penn and writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson decide on it? Was McMahon (or RFK Jr., who people have also compared Penn’s performance to) an actual source of inspiration? Is it canonically a result of Perfidia (seemingly) pegging Lockjaw with his own gun during one of their motel meetings?
Either way, it’s such a silly thing that contributes beautifully to the tone of One Battle After Another, which oscillates between intense and horrifying and hilarious in the span of seconds. By the movie’s third act, when Lockjaw somehow survives being shot point-blank in the head by a fellow Christmas Adventurers member and walks across the hilly highway, the sight of him doing that walk while caked in his own blood plays like a mix between a scene from Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the punchline of a Looney Tunes cartoon. It made the packed crowd at our showing laugh out loud, and it made his actual death a few scenes later all the more satisfying.
As a character recently said on my favorite television show of the year: “being goofy isn’t a threat.” But as our real world has proven, sometimes the most terrifying men who are capable of real horror are… also kind of weird. One Battle After Another captures this in its own absurd and incredibly relevant ways through Lockjaw, down to the way that he literally moves through the world.
(featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures)
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