ACTION; 2hr 42min
STARRING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti
On point: DiCaprio
The life of a vigilante is a nose-thumbing adrenaline rush into which writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson plunges with a vengeance in his sweeping adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland.
Back in their boom-crash glory days, the French 75 were revolutionary pot-stirrers par excellence, and a nagging pain in the collective butts of the bureaucratic powers-that-be, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Penn) front and centre among them. Sixteen years down a seriously beaten track, however, raising revolutionary hell has long since grown old. Smokin’ hot primo 75ers “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor) are now kaput as a couple: with the treacherous Perfidia in witness protection, Pat, now renamed Bob Ferguson, has been left to raise their sparky daughter, Willa (Infiniti), on the down-low.
This state of play fails to sit well with grudge-bearing martinet Lockjaw, with whom Perfidia has something of a twisted sexual history and who refuses to let the sting of rejection lie. When he comes after Bob and Willa, it’s game on for a sadly out-of-shape Bob, his nonchalant offsider and Willa’s sensei, Sergio (de Toro), and a cast of who knows how many other deadly contenders, stage-managed by Anderson (There Will Be Blood) with unflagging panache.
The smorgasbord of crazy served up from here is action stations on steroids, zapped along by a certifiably twitchy Bob, who teeters on a roiling current of menace that never takes itself too seriously, no matter how sky-high the stakes. All bets are off for everybody, with the sole exception of a father’s enduring love for his daughter. No hellraiser in his right mind would contemplate messing with that.
