Before his stint with Godzilla and King Kong, director Adam Wingard made his name throughout the early 2010s via the popularity of two fun genre thrillers, You’re Next and The Guest. Although Wingard isn’t making a sequel to the latter, his new film Onslaught contains a lot of similar DNA. Reteaming with long-time collaborator Simon Barrett, it’s a heavily John Carpenter-influenced action-horror flick centring on secret government programs, and features Dan Stevens as a central character. Onslaught does have enough thrills to stand out on its own, even if it misses the heights of The Guest.
The film stars Adria Arjona as Celeste, a former Army sniper haunted by the trauma of a failed mission who now lives in a trailer park in the New Mexico desert. As a result, she has a strained relationship with her ex-husband and her seven-year-old daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy), who is staying with her for the weekend. In a hidden compound several miles away, third-generation Nazi scientist Hans Kemmler is working on a government-approved project: A trio of genetically-enhanced super-soldiers.
Described by Kemmler as “the human equivalent of a heat-seeking missile,” the soldiers are impervious to pain and driven by a single-minded instinct: kill everyone in their path. Think Jason Voorhees, Rambo and the Terminator thrown into a blender. Sure enough, the trio goes rogue and escapes the compound. They come across the mother-and-daughter duo and follow them home, forcing Celeste to rely on her military instincts to protect her daughter and survive the night.
“Onslaught does have enough thrills to stand out on its own, even if it misses the heights of The Guest.”
Right off the bat, Onslaught is a film that wastes very little time. It even begins with a 12-hour countdown to the moment the soldiers escape. During that countdown, Barrett’s script touches on some interesting subject matter. A montage during the opening credits runs through the history of U.S. warfare in reverse chronological order, eventually reaching Operation Paperclip, a secret program in which Nazi scientists were recruited by the U.S. government after the Second World War.
Scenes in the first act featuring Kemmler and government stooge Baylor, played by 1980s icon Michael Biehn, really hammer home the chilling, but not implausible, concept of the government using such a weapon against its own people. Unfortunately, any deeper exploration of the subject largely falls by the wayside once that timer runs out.
Once the timer does run out, things go to hell in a hurry. The second and third acts are essentially a slasher moving like a siege film. Over the last few years, Adria Arjona has quickly become an actor I look forward to seeing in anything. Even if Celeste lacks a bit of depth as a character, it’s a great showcase for her as an action presence. She’s easy to root for despite the rough, and it’s undeniably cool to see her wield a chainsaw against these psychopaths.
“Ultimately, Onslaught is a good movie that’s just on the cusp of a great one.”
Conversely, the soldiers themselves –codenamed Crybaby (Tyler Hall), The Cockroach (Dave Campbell) and The Butcher (Alex Pereira) – are imposing figures with a very striking look. Their glowing eyes are directly reminiscent of Carpenter’s The Fog. Their acts of violence against the civilian populace –namely a mass shooting in a gas station– are legitimately unsettling. There are also fun supporting performances by Reginald VelJohnson as fellow vet Josiah, and Eric Wareheim (of Tim & Eric fame) brings in some good laughs as cowardly cop Kovacks.
My hangup is that, as cool and bloody as the shootouts are, it needed some variety in the action. You’d think with the Butcher being played by a former UFC champ in Alex Pereira, there would be a bigger hand-to-hand element, but it’s purely all shootouts. The action is occasionally broken up by scenes following clean-up agent Cyrus (Drew Starkey) working for Hemmler’s wife Hanna (Rebecca Hall). My biggest hangup: the movie ends a bit too suddenly for my liking. The film even goes out of its way to establish a connection between Celeste and the Butcher, only for it to carry little weight by the time the movie wraps up a short while later.
Ultimately, Onslaught is a good movie that’s just on the cusp of a great one. It’s still a fun ride that’s tailor-made for the midnight crowd, but it’s the rare instance of a movie actually needing more fat to really become something truly special. It’s more like the movie that precedes the future classic.
