Review: Onslaught — Crooked Marquee

No one was ever going to refer to Adam Wingard as a “humanist director.” Whether we’re talking about his mostly successful early films like The Guest and You’re Next or his risible franchise entries Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, Godzilla vs. Kong, and Blair Witch, the genre filmmaker isn’t exactly known for treating his characters as real people deserving of empathy. But oof, is Onslaught a brutal, unpleasant movie for most of its 90-minute runtime. At some points, it fleetingly feels like a return to the blood-soaked fun of his early filmography, with its grimy aesthetic and synth score, but it’s mostly just a nasty piece of work that seems content to wreak havoc and create carnage while only fitfully managing to entertain.

Onslaught starts off strong enough, introducing us not only to Celeste (Adria Arjona), a scrappy vet scraping by in a desert trailer park who spends her mornings doing target practice, but also Doctor Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), a German doctor who bears passing resemblance to Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Picture Show (but, you know, a Nazi). Stevens gets to use the Teutonic accent he showed off in I’m Your Man, but with none of that romantic lead’s charm. Here, he plays a mad scientist who is creating super soldiers for a company contracted by the government. The three faceless killers he engineered escape the secret facility, leaving a trail of blood and guts across the desert, with a mysterious man (Drew Starkey) following in their wake, trying to cover up their crimes from the public. Yet the trio is headed toward Celeste, who still has some fight in her after years out of the service, especially since her young daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) is staying at her home after being dropped off by her dad.

The script by Wingard and frequent collaborator Simon Barrett has a little fun in the beginning, but then it turns unrelentingly bleak in its middle third, after the trio of soldiers escape containment. The meeting between these three brutal killers and our heroine is inevitable. Wingard and Barrett obviously have to establish how unstoppable, unforgiving, and invincible these soldiers are before the final faceoff, but Onslaught’s approach to establishing their brutal bona fides is overkill. They plow through civilians, and it all feels pointless and bleak. It sparks back to life in its final act when the expected confrontation happens, and then it just … ends. Onslaught builds up to the climax that we know is coming, gives the audience a quick battle between Celeste and these monsters, and then it’s over without really doing or saying much of anything beyond letting Arjona briefly be a badass and say lines like, “C’mon, you little bitch!”

And that’s about as smart as it gets. Wingard begins with a montage of news clips over the decades going back to World War II, edited to echo the cocaine-fueled cuts of MTV’s heyday. It’s not entirely clear what he’s trying to say other than governments are corrupt and war is bad. While it’s tough to disagree with those sentiments, it’s all clunkily communicated, slashing blindly and wildly at the evils of the military industrial complex and fascist governments with far less skill than the super soldiers on screen.

These killers are given brief intros and nicknames, but there’s not much to differentiate them from either each other or from horror movie villains in general. They’re played by a big-name MMA fighter (Alex Pereira) and a pair of stuntmen (Tyler Hall, Dave Campbell), and their only real characteristic is animalistic bloodlust and eerie lights in their eyes. For actors with such impeccable action credentials, it’s unclear exactly how good of fighters they are, and whether that’s the performances or the way the scenes were shot and cut. Beyond their killing style, their lack of real characterization points to their engineered lack of humanity. But it’s also just boring as shit.

Yet there are some elements that work in Onslaught, for those who are in the same elder Millennial/young Gen-X cohort as Wingard. He casts ‘80s sci-fi/action favorite Michael Biehn in a bit part, but the real throwback casting coup is Die Hard sidekick/Family Matters dad Reginald VelJohnson, who plays a gruff but lovable trailer park neighbor who gets to deliver perhaps the movie’s best line of dialogue (a low bar). Beyond the appeal to fortysomethings, Rebecca Hall (who should be appreciated by anyone, regardless of generation or gender) has a small role, where she somehow simultaneously gets to be hot and cold.

Onslaught is clearly modeled on the grindhouse movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but Wingard has unearthed more trash than treasure with his return to the genre. There’s some fun to be found, but it’s buried beneath layers of dour dirt. You’ll get far more pleasure watching The Guest or some of the vintage offerings that Onslaught attempts to ape than this mostly miserable movie.