A former soldier scarred by battlefield trauma fights to protect her home and her young daughter when three genetically enhanced killing machines escape from a lab and descend upon her remote desert trailer park in Adam Wingard’s semi-slasher, Onslaught.
Celeste (Adria Arjona) is not doing great. Her time in the trenches really did a number on her psyche, breaking up her marriage and leading her to hide away in the nowheresville that is a Moriarty, New Mexico mobile home park where she splits her time between target practice and harassing the residents over their late rent payments.
Meanwhile, a nearby secret research facility houses mad scientist, Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), conducting human experiments designed to create the perfect soldier, an unstoppable killing machine with no emotion, that he’s planning on selling to the highest bidder. When a trio of these single-minded human buzzsaws predictably escape their confinement, they find themselves with a singular focus: they must destroy every human being in their path and leave no witnesses.
A casual trip to the gas station for Celeste and her daughter, Daisy (Blake Kennedy), puts the pair in the crosshairs of The Butcher (Alex Pereira), The Crybaby (Tyler Hall), and The Cockroach (Dave Campbell) when Daisy makes the mistake of spotting them off in the distance. Celeste drives back home, not realizing that she’s being followed and that her park is about to become their bloody playground.
After spending half a decade turning Legendary’s Godzilla-centric Monsterverse into a giddy wonderland of neon colors and kaiju mayhem, Adam Wingard returns to his low budget roots with Onslaught, a film that aims to remind people that this is the same filmmaker who turned the heads of the genre world with 2011’s home invasion banger, You’re Next, and 2014’s The Guest. Where those films relied upon building a small core of characters with whom the audience could empathize, Onslaught is focused entirely on violence, hence the title.
There is a lot of sound and fury going on in Onslaught, but not much of substance really happens. There was speculation when the trailer released that the film was going to be a continuation of the world of The Guest, which also featured a remorseless super-soldier in Dan Stevens’ “David”, and while that is not the case here, there are enough similarities here to wonder, “why not”? The Guest is a modestly budgeted and executed film that takes full advantage of Stevens’ undeniable charm and an emotionally intelligent script from Wingard’s writing partner, Simon Barrett. Onslaught eschews all of that in favor of spectacle, which leaves the story as a distant second priority behind exploitation spectacle.
The film introduces potential emotional conflicts left and right without taking much time to explore them. Celeste’s PTSD recurs throughout the film through repeated flashbacks, giving us a tiny glimpse of the experiences behind her shell shock, but even that feels undercooked when it’s incorporated into the story. She seems to be the only person living in any approximation of a real world, the research facility and Stevens’ cartoonishly evil Nazi scientist, Kammler, are in a whole different movie. A movie I’d watch, for sure, but not one that makes any sense here.
Onslaught commitment to extreme violence at all opportunities will get some people’s blood pumping for sure, but I just kept asking myself, “why”? The killers have no clear goal, even after their modus operandi is explained, the impetus behind the siege of the mobile home park seems specious at best. Drew Starky plays Cyrus, a government agent who is called in to clean up the mess, but whose presence in the film is completely inconsequential. Rebecca Hall plays Kammler’s wife, who seems like she was flown in for 48 hours to shoot a couple of wraparound scenes, who is nearly as mustache-twirly as her husband in the evil department. None of it really gels and even for a ninety-two-minute film, it feels overstuffed.
It’s not all fluff, though, Onslaught does manage to eke by most of the time on the strength of its supporting performances. Genre legend Michael Biehn shows up as an interested buyer at Kammler’s facility and does whet he does best – you Predator and Aliens fans know what I’m talking about. Reginald VelJohnson shows up as Josiah, an elder vet who supports Celeste emotionally and with firepower as they fight for their lives. And even though I question what movie he’s in, Dan Stevens over-the-top Kammler is a delight on screen, bringing the energy of a Peter Sellers in Strangelove or Gregory Peck in Boys from Brazil with a ridiculous amount of charisma and a terrible wig. Unfortunately, these parts are just not enough to make this film a successful whole.
There has been a recent trend of Gen X and millennial filmmakers attempting to rekindle the fires of ‘70s and ‘80s exploitation films to varying levels of success. This year has unfortunately seen some of the lesser examples, and while Onslaught doesn’t nearly plumb the depths to which Eli Roth’s miserable Ice Cream Man, nor does it succeed in resurrecting the joy of the genre’s better films. Adria Arjona does her best, but after a while, her interminable brooding loses its meaning, and her character starts to feel just as empty as the murderous ciphers on her trail. With an almost non-existent plot held together by a web of extreme violence and meanness, and unimportant and/or underutilized characters, Onslaught left me cold.