Review: ONSLAUGHT

 by Rob DiCristino

In which Adam Wingard gets back to basics.

You know what? Let’s just cut to the chase on this one: Onslaught is not a very good film. It’s a crass, empty, and juvenile actioner, a reheated John Carpenter riff that sorely lacks the gritty authenticity and cynical defiance of Carpenter masterpieces like The Thing, They Live, and Assault on Precinct 13. Unlike those films, Onslaught is forced and overeager, bending over backward to be transgressive in a laughable, 2010 sort of way. Co-written with longtime partner Simon Barrett, Adam Wingard’s first independent effort since 2014 is an impotent temper tantrum from a filmmaker venting his frustration over the decade he’s spent trapped in the IP hellscape of Godzilla vs. Kong (a vibrant franchise with a real impact on pop culture; surely you have a number of favorite scenes from those memorable films!). And I sympathize, Mr. Wingard. I really do. After the critical success of The Guest and the commercial breakthrough of You’re Next, I’d have taken the big sack of money, too! But by returning to his genre roots, Wingard proves that money might not buy creative happiness.

But hang on. We’ll get there. Onslaught is the story of retired Army sniper Celeste (Adria Arjona), whose post-traumatic stress disorder has destroyed her marriage (to Jacob Scipo’s Griffin), made her a stranger to her young daughter (Blake Kennedy as Daisy), and doomed her to ownership of a run-down trailer park on the desert outskirts of a mysterious military facility. When a work emergency forces Griffin to leave Daisy with Celeste unexpectedly — interrupting an afternoon of target practice that Sarah Connor would find excessive — the struggling veteran must put on a brave face and play the part of “Mommy.” Meanwhile, in the aforementioned mysterious military facility, a trio of hulking, undead supersoldiers engineered by a third-generation Nazi scientist (Dan Stevens in elderly makeup as Dr. Kammler) and his wife (Thundering Badass Rebecca Hall as Frau Kammler) have murdered their caretakers and escaped. Guess where they’re heading? No, really. Guess. I’m going to give you three guesses. Remember, Celeste’s a sniper, and this movie is called Onslaught.

You get it. Gaudy, brainless, and deeply uninspired, Onslaught is the kind of back-to-basics passion project that recalls Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, and Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. Here’s how it works: Fed up with the machinations of major studio filmmaking — machinations that led to either commercial embarrassment or critical dismissal (and occasionally both) — an artist attempts to reassert their street cred with a project that recreates the circumstances of their original success. In this case, Wingard trades the bottomless pocketbook of Warner Brothers for the bespoke chinos of A24 and films a screenplay so low-concept that it appears almost foolproof. How could Wingard possibly fumble a gory siege thriller, especially one that boasts supporting roles from genre luminaries like The Terminator’s Michael Biehn (as Dr. Kammler’s government handler) and Die Hard’s Reginald VelJohnson (as Celeste’s irascible neighbor, Josiah). Guts? Guns? Gore? Some leather fetish bondage porn for good measure? Is this not the definition of cinema?

Perhaps it is. And perhaps I should cut Wingard some slack for at least trying to layer in the occasional theme — the big chunguses are all vets whose trauma drove them to violence; they represent who Celeste might become if she doesn’t check her anger and rediscover her humanity before it’s too late — but those half-hearted attempts are so clumsy and underdeveloped that it might have been better if he hadn’t bothered with them at all. He might not also have bothered with an entirely unnecessary subplot involving Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a Molly-loving special agent charged with mopping up the bloody messes that the big chunguses — led by UFC’s Alex Pereira as “The Butcher” — leave in their wake. He’s in an entirely different movie about a speed-addicted failson with a fauxhawk who makes no tangible contribution to anything we care even the slightest bit about. His screen time comes at the expense of meaningful development for Celeste and Daisy, neither of whom grow or change in any way whatsoever. But hey, at least that one guy got his leg sawed off!

I’m probably being too hard on Adam Wingard and Onslaught, which is ultimately a perfectly serviceable and good-looking ode to one of our great directors — the interstitial titles use the Carpenter Font, just in case you weren’t sure — anchored by an effective performance from Adria Arjona. It features enough gnarly kills to hit your #ScaryMovieMonth rotation this year, and one imagines that the experience of making something this down-and-dirty after two CGI blockbusters about a gorilla must have reinvigorated Wingard’s love for his craft — he’s notably not attached to 2027’s Godzilla x Kong: Supernova — and reminded him that good art is born of adversity. With that said, I hope Onslaught’s piss-poor screenplay and lack of any real dramatic propulsion also reminded him that just because a film is “simple” doesn’t mean it’s “easy.” Halloween is simple. That’s what makes it brilliant. The Fog is simple. That’s what makes it brilliant. Big Trouble in Little China is…well, fairly convoluted, actually, but you understand what I’m trying to say.

Onslaught hits U.S. theaters on Friday, September 4th.