Onslaught Review

A Brisk and Bloody Throwback That’s Mostly Just Noise

By: Marc Kozak

Onslaught

A Brisk and Bloody Throwback That’s Mostly Just Noise

By: Marc Kozak

Adam Wingard’s Onslaught is one of the loudest movies you’ll see this year. Characters often appear suddenly on frame while engaging in a wince-inducing activity, like revving a motorcycle, starting up a chainsaw or even operating a blender, all while the object’s audio is cranked as high as it can go in the overall mix. Scene transitions are often punctuated with a stupendous blast of sound, musical or otherwise. The first 15 minutes of the movie use about 15 different needle drops, all seemingly designed to get your blood to start vibrating.

Truthfully, Wingard’s bloody tribute to B-movies from the 1980s is not much else but a lot of noise. In an attempt to go back to the basics of his earlier work (before he went on to direct two Godzilla vs. Kong movies with mega budgets for Warner Brothers), Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett give us pretty much only the basics, providing such sparse narrative details that there’s not much else to do but to let your eyes glaze over and mindlessly take in a simultaneously brisk and eternal 92 minutes of explosions and violence. If that’s all you’re looking for – and literally nothing else – then you might have a good time. Other than a few half-hearted thematic gestures and a story built almost entirely on clichés, there’s really not much else going on.

Adria Arjona has the thankless task of trying to make viewers feel anything for her character Celeste, an ex-Army sniper who lives in a trailer park with a few other scruffy vets. She engages in some friendly shit-talking with her closest neighbors, including Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson, most known as Carl Winslow from Family Matters), a weary old soldier who is just over all of this nonsense, and Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), a surly police officer with a drinking problem. Each person in the trailer park is struggling with their own version of PTSD, hiding away from the rest of the world in the only place where they feel some sense of safety and community.

" Onslaught provides such sparse narrative details that there’s not much else to do but to let your eyes glaze over and mindlessly take in a simultaneously brisk and eternal 92 minutes of explosions and violence. "

Of course, if you’ve read the movie’s tagline before going in, you know that things are about to get significantly less safe. In the story’s other thread, we meet the fabulous Dr. Kammler (Dan Stevens in the world’s smoothest bald cap, delightfully chewing any and all available scenery), a cape-wearing Nazi scientist who adores his domineering wife (Rebecca Hall, sadly only in the movie for about a minute) and oversees a program to create genetically altered super soldiers for the government. After we get the requisite scene that shows us how murderously badass they are, the three-man squad of test subjects easily escapes the facility and starts out on a path of senseless death and destruction that leads straight to Celeste’s desert haven.

And wouldn’t you know it, here comes Celeste’s ex, swinging by unscheduled to drop off their preposterously precocious daughter just before the carnage begins. It’s just one of several contrived and halfhearted attempts to manufacture additional drama without spending too much time or energy away from the loud stuff (see also: an utterly pointless timer that counts down to when the super-soldiers escape).

From here on out, it’s all gruesome mayhem, choreographed well and shot with impressive gusto by cinematographer Oren Soffer (The Creator). There are a few impressive kills (if you’re into that sort of thing), particularly when the available guns run out of ammo and people have to start using objects lying around the trailer park as weapons. This is the stuff Wingard and company are most interested in, and for whatever it’s worth, they are quite good at bringing it to life. If you’re capable of switching your mind off and enjoying this kind of blood-spattered chaos, you're in luck; there’s certainly a lot of it here for you.

If there’s anything much more than that on the movie’s mind, it’s not immediately apparent. There’s some well-intentioned but fairly basic commentary about the mistreatment of veterans (at one point, Josiah essentially looks into the camera and says something like “the government is always fucking over us veterans!”). An opening montage of presidents past and present speaks to America’s ongoing fascination with war. A government operative (Drew Starkey) is introduced as a drugged-up deviant before he goes from scene to scene, cleaning up the damage and doing his master’s bidding. It’s all just a bit too shallow, never really choosing to engage with any of this thematic material beyond simply putting in the high-level bullet points. Sure, this isn’t the kind of movie we should expect brain-busting political commentary from, but the inclusion of even the broadest hint of substance feels like both too much and not enough in this instance.

Onslaught is a military-grade action movie that doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before but could still hold some easy thrills for those looking to shut their mind off and watch something that isn’t that deep. Really, these kinds of movies are basically review-proof — you’re likely only going to seek it out to scratch a very specific itch. If you’ve made it this far into this review, hopefully you already know if you’re going to like the movie or not. Act accordingly.