Film Review: ‘Onslaught’ is a Boring Pastiche of ’80s Action

If Adam Wingard was in any need of inspiration after working on drab blockbusters that diluted the grandeur of the Kaiju eiga inside grey-sludged battlefields, a movie like Onslaught, on paper, sounds like the return to form such a genre auteur needs to remind himself what made him fall in love with moviemaking in the first place. A lean-and-mean actioner where supersoldiers attack a small-town community and face resistance they didn’t think possible? Sign me up! I don’t even need to watch a trailer. I’m there on day one!

Sadly, the ideas don’t cohere as much as Wingard and writer Simon Barrett hope, starting with a strange prologue that introduces Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) and his dominatrix wife, Hanna (Rebecca Hall), as the doctor travels to a secret military compound to present his latest invention to a mercenary leader (Michael Biehn). The opening credits certainly prime the audience to expect that the film is set in a world that has abandoned all sense of democracy and has completely consumed itself, but that’s about as far as Wingard and Barrett will go in a screenplay that throws far too many concepts at us and refuses to develop any of them.

We’re to believe that the supersoldiers Kammler has created are the ultimate killing machines, but to what end will they actually serve? Black ops, probably, but that’s a guess rather than something that the screenplay establishes. In any event, the supersoldiers are actually quite effective at killing, perhaps too effective, and easily escape containment, where they eventually reach the aforementioned community. In that trailer park lies Celeste (Adria Arjona), an Army sniper who, despite her parental issues, is a very good shot. The soldiers may be strong, but they’ve grossly underestimated the town they’ve attacked, and this is apparently where the real movie begins.

I say “apparently” because Onslaught builds towards a relentless (extended) set piece, where Celeste and her neighbor Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) face off against the horde of supersoldiers, but the action is so underwhelming that it barely impresses. After all, extreme gore and Adria Arjona with a chainsaw were the movie’s main draws. Wingard certainly delivers on both fronts, but the action is so painfully underlit (and repetitive) that any moment of real catharsis rarely impresses. It is an arguable aesthetic step above Wingard’s last movie, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, whose action scenes were incomprehensible.

In contrast, Onslaught’s action is more legible, but it’s also less technically impressive, because it essentially puts Celeste and Josiah in a trailer for most of the time as they try to shoot at the soldiers, even when it clearly doesn’t work. That sequence gets tiresome relatively fast, but goes on for an eternity, even as cinematographer Oren Soffer attempts to dazzle with chintzy crash zooms that easily recall the great B movies of the Cannon Group era. Those movies, though, were filled with enough crazy action to compensate for the lack of genuine emotional texture. Onslaught doesn’t possess that same adrenaline, no matter how “gory” the film gets.

The main problem with the film, though, is that it lacks an identity of its own. For the bulk of its runtime, Onslaught bathes in endless references to John Carpenter, James Cameron, and John McTiernan. Matt Pusti‘s music is an obvious callback to Carpenter, but Wingard doesn’t try to wear these influences on his sleeve; instead, he pushes the film’s concepts forward. It’s fine to have a movie that embraces the 1980s, but it’s not enough for it to only do that and hope the audience goes along for the ride, especially when you don’t flesh out anything beyond what is introduced and instead promise that all will be revealed in a sequel. That’s neither original nor groundbreaking, but pure laziness.

At least Wingard has assembled a fairly reliable cast of actors, with Arjona showing exactly why she’s one of the most exciting talents working today. If Onslaught acts as preparation for her upcoming role as a rumored Wonder Woman in James Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow, then consider me sold. Celeste is actually the only character with emotional depth, thanks to the soulful relationship she shares with her daughter, Daisy (Blake Kennedy), while everyone else is either a one-liner machine or a character to be teased in future installments. Chief among them is government worker Cyrus (Drew Starkey), who arrives at the scene of the incident and does absolutely nothing. Barring Arjona, Wingard wastes most of his talented ensemble in roles that give them very little to do, especially Hall’s Frau Kammler, an intriguing character on paper but given barely any time to make us aware of who she actually is.

By far, however, the biggest disappointment that occurs in the movie is that Wingard promises a chainsaw-on-blade fight, which would theoretically make Onslaught the spiritual successor to Lau Kar-leung‘s Tiger on the Beat. If you haven’t watched that film, the chainsaw fight alone between Conan Lee and Gordon Liu is one of the greatest action setpieces ever put on celluloid and continues to blow my mind even after rewatching that sequence a thousand times already. If you’re promising a chainsaw fight and clearly position it as your “big moment,” I want a chainsaw fight, dammit! There’s a fight, but can we really call it that? To say I’m bummed, because this film brims with so much potential, would be the understatement of the year.

SCORE: ★★