Review: 'Onslaught' Is Over Before You Even Know It

After spending a few years making gigantic apes punch gigantic lizards in the face with their freshly aquired robot-fists, director Adam Wingard has decided to step back into his familiar shoes of a humble, bloodthirsty man again. The simple pleasures. And so the person who once gifted us with intimate killer thrillers a la You’re Next and The Guest is back in that comfortable form this weekend with Onslaught, a movie which definitely has some pleasures packed into its tight 89-minute frame—even if none of them live up to the standard he set with those earlier visions. Getting back intact from the Monsterverse is a more fraught journey than it might seem.

A movie like Onslaught does slip a critic into a pickle, though. Do we tell you that it’s pretty successful in perfectly aping the bad 80s / 90s Z-grade actioners that it’s working overtime to ape—think Universal Soldier, or anything starring Dolph Lundgren really? Or do we review it on the merits of those same movies, which were mostly bad and dumb? At least those movies managed to be bad and dumb on their own merits—they were pure in their badness and dumbness. Wingard leaves us scratching our heads wondering if his thin characterizations and third-act bust are all on purpose. It’s much like the difference between the real camp of Showgirls and something like Sharknado, a vacuous try-hard. We know when we’re being pandered to and we know that it’s never really the same. Who picks imitation crab when you’ve already got a refidgerator full of the real thing?

Onslaught stars Adria Arjona (of Andor—give it up for Andor—and Hit Man fame, and oh right Maybe Totally Wonder Woman) as the desert trailer-park fixer-upper Celeste… and even after seeing this movie twice I’d have never been able to tell you her name is Celeste, of all the names. “Celeste”? “Celeste” is what you name the shrew who stole the perfect man away from the heroine in a rom-com. We’re reclaiming the Celeste, I guess! This one is for the Celestes. Anyway “Celeste, apparently” here is an ex-grunt who picked herself up a mean case of PTSD while serving overseas—we learn all of this right from the start as she gets the shakes while blowing the faces off some pumpkins.

And is that a The Guest shout-out? It felt like a The Guest shout-out (that movie is famously Halloween-set) but then I was on the look-out for The Guest shout-outs since Wingard’s claimed these two films are set in the same universe. You have to really squint for it though, and I’m not sure it matters. Much like most of it.

Anyway soon enough a trio of unstoppable super-soldiers that’ve escaped from the secret military base over the hill will put Celeste’s shakes to the test as they-three march in and start slaughtering all of her colorful fellow desert dwellers. And all on her weekend with the kid (Blake Kennedy)? The nerve.

Engineering said super soldiers is a mad scientist named Hans Kammler, and yes Dan Stevens, in a greying bald cap and lots of powder, gives you exactly the accent you’d expect a character named “Hans Kammler” to have. Apparently locked into a battle of the freakiest with Robert Pattinson, Mr. Stevens is clearly having a lot of fun here. (I am convinced he got to choose the prominent location of a mole himself.) As is the great and formidably-underused Rebecca Hall as his hot wife Frau Kammler, who shows up for a couple of scenes to get her toes licked and to answer the telephone while covered in blood for no discernable reason. (Besides that in itself is a reason. Which it is.) Oh and there’s a trippin-balls government spook named Cyrus (played by a bleach-eyebrowed Drew Starkey) who’s running around cleaning up everybody’s mess—and believe it or not he seems to be having the most fun of all. (It kind of feels at moments like this is his an American Psycho try-out.)

Anyway Wingard (and the script by frequent collaborator Simon Barrett) does a fine job of transmitting to us the basics of these characters in quick bursts, a necessity in a flick this swift and brutal; it’s just we land on “basics” and we never expand from there. The characters don’t have so much an “arc” as they do a “gentle curve”—“one note” is generous wording. Whereas The Guest and You’re Next felt like they were taking the spare parts of old formulas to make something new with them, advancing genre in interesting ways, Onslaught stays too stuck in first-gear homage to ever really register. Beyond when it’s being aggressively loud and gory, at least.

Admittedly there are some clear and present nudges toward interesting ideas about the crappy ways this country ruins and tosses aside our veterans—not to mention that the visuals of masked militarized men storming into civilian spaces and massacring them is a loaded one in 2026, to put it mildly—none of that goes anywhere. Celeste learns… to love killing again? Yay? But the most unforgivable crime is how the film basically lurches to a stand-still once the trailer-park showdown commences—Wingard obviously wanted to land those cool John Carpenter shots of creepy figures standing in dark blue night mist, and he does that… over and over and over again. I’m reticent to even call what happens a third act—it’s more like the 2 ¼ act, if even. The movie just stops?

The fact that the super-soldiers are personality-less like jackbooted Michael Myers triplets isn’t necessarily a hindrance to it—if you’ve seen any video of I.C.E. agents on your timelines than you know these types can’t string a coherent thought together anyway. Nor do we want to hear them say it; best keep them quiet. It’s not like the pirates who invaded Antonio Bay were elocution experts. Dr. Kammler gets to deliver a loaded White-Supremicist-tinged speech about the “coming storm” in the soldiers’ name anyway, which places plenty enough purpose over their brief but bright plague of violence. (A horrific scene set in a convenience store underlines said purpose with a long red smear and is probably what this film will be remembered for, if anything.)

Onslaught is seemingly just happy to cast small roles with 80s action totems like The Terminator’s Michael Biehn and Die Hard’s Reginald VelJohnson and tumble them around for a few minutes so we all do the “Leo pointing at the screen” meme—nothing ever strains for much more beyond that sensation. The whole movie is that. Buckets of imitation crab. That’s fine enough as an exercise in airlessness, one supposes, but this movie, even at its most brutal, will never genuinely shock you. I doubt it will even be remembered longer than oh say 1991’s Showdown in Little Tokyo has been. Wingard would presumably, given the hard evidence on hand, take that company as a compliment. He shouldn’t.