"Onslaught" review — Self-indulgent action throwback never really satisfies
“Momma needs to get her guns.”
If I paid full-price admission to see Adam Wingard’s Onslaught, a very self-conscious and self-indulgent throwback genre exploitation riff, I would have been sorely disappointed. The film barely functions beyond being an explosive sensory overload, while still often underutilizing its propensity for extreme and merciless violence. No character ever really gets their chance to shine, either as a compellingly written human being or as a “rule-of-cool,” style-points-only action archetype, as the film reaches for entirely undeserved pathos. No plotline comes to a satisfying conclusion, even somehow defying the most basic conventions of plot structure, making its narrative choices laughably underwhelming. It’s almost baffling just how incoherent the film is, wanting to be too many things at once, while never really being any of them. But seeing this on a whim to capitalize on five-dollar ticket weekend at my local multiplex meant that I was in the prime headspace to be swept up into the maddening, gonzo splatter fest, as America’s wartime demons are drummed up for violent, if not thoughtless, display. With buckets upon buckets of watery fake blood and more high-style point lighting rigs than it knows that to do with, Onslaught is far from the perfect action movie (it’s far from even a good one), but the film is just insane enough to keep itself moving from beginning to end.
Onslaught is a slasher-action-sci-fi-shoot ‘em up, and the latest film from director Adam Wingard, the filmmaker behind You’re Next and the first two Godzilla vs. Kong movies. He’s reunited with his ever-faithful screenwriter and collaborator Simon Barrett, who has penned many of Wingard’s previous features. With Onslaught, Wingard is doing his best impression of the low-budget grindhouse pictures of yore, equipped with serif-font intertitles, a striking low-light visual texture, and a spacey, electronic score. There are plenty of notes of John Carpenter scattered throughout, an influence Wingard is quick to name, with tinges of James Cameron’s original Terminator. Despite the beautiful simplicity of its central narrative, the film is largely a mess, even if the violence keeps the film moving at a reasonable clip. Wingard is certainly having fun with his toys, and it’s often fun to watch him play pretend as that energy infects every frame on screen. But the film isn’t nearly original enough, in either concept or execution, to feel like anything more than just imitation, reheated ideas from stronger filmmakers. It’s vibes-based action nostalgia, delivered through the barrel of a semi-automatic rifle.
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| Photo via A24. |
While Adria Arjona plays the film’s lead, it’s better to start the story with Dan Stevens’ psychotic, over-powdered Dr. Hans Kammler. Kammler is a “third-generation” graft of Operation Paperclip, the U.S. government’s real-life project to get former Nazis to work for them. But Kammler’s loyalties lie within the land of his forefathers, and he is using his top-secret research, funded by a private military contractor, to take revenge on the American populace. His perfect plan? Three thoughtless, remorseless super soldiers with ridiculous nicknames (Crybaby, Cockroach, and The Butcher) who just so happen to escape from his facility during a test-gone-wrong. Far outside the heavy blast doors of the military bunker, Adria Arjona plays ex-military sniper Celeste Cross. With heaps of leftover PTSD from an unnamed American desert war, she’s busy serving as a manager of a trailer park in remote New Mexico, whose inhabitants range from fellow veterans, penniless young people, and an alcoholic police sheriff. It’s not long before Dr. Kammler’s projects start to wreak havoc upon the hapless people of the American Southwest, as they slowly encroach upon Celeste’s piece of the desert world. Celeste might even have more at stake personally than she ever realized.
For its strongest, most ineffable quality, Onslaught looks excellent, which comes from its commitment to old-school aesthetics. From an interview with the film’s cinematographer, Oren Soffer, Onslaught used a digital-to-film-to-digital post-production process to capture the authentic film texture without it being a complete fabrication of digital recolouring. The film absolutely delights in being a throwback to the era of exploitation movie-making, where the blood flows cheap, and the violence is ever-present. The action works fairly well, with three particularly striking action sequences dotting the runtime. I could only wish for more, expanding the language of chaos and the involvement of a few more parties. There are, like any good slasher, some excellent kills, both when the super soldiers act like a logical, tactical strike unit and, especially, when they start to lose their stability and resort to more creative, improvised weaponry (chainsaws and knives and barbecues, oh my!). The score by Matthew Pusti is a treat of aching, atmospheric synths, pulled straight from the dreamt memories of 1980s moviemaking and music producing. And the make-up! I can’t sing the praises of the make-up team enough, in both the design of a couple of key characters and the unruly levels of gore and blood splattered across the film. It’s a technical stunner, with all the practical effects and textures needed to sell a movie like this. If only it didn’t feel so undercooked.
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| Photo via A24. |
The performances are a real grab-bag of varying degrees of quality. The stand-outs are easily Arjona and Stevens. Arjona — an actress who has managed to salvage her career out of a lesser Michael Bay picture and the disastrous Morbius with excellent turns in Hit Man and Splitsville — makes for a compelling, sure-footed lead. Stevens’ pale-faced German scientist is so purely archetypally evil that it becomes the refreshing choice, complete with some insane performance choices. The rest of the cast work on much more uneven terrain. Drew Starkey and Rebecca Hall are denied the opportunities to really shine. Starkey plays a bleach-blonde government “clean-up guy” sent after the three super soldiers, only he’s got a tiny MDMA problem which is quickly catching up to him. Except, Starkey’s character simply gets forgotten before he can even do anything. Hall (who previously put in supporting appearances in Wingard’s Godzilla/Kong movies) pulls up the rear as Frau Kammler, who is deployed strategically in the film’s first and final acts, but doesn’t really get enough screen time to feel like a fully developed secondary antagonist. Meanwhile, some of the film’s cast are way too overplayed where the disappointing lack of other characters all the more infuriating. The most glaring is Alex Pereira, a former UFC fighter in his film debut, whose villain character is one of the most laughable anticlimaxes in recent memory.
The film is messy in how it writes its characters and story, often mishandling the dosage of various forces in the story, which ends up impacting its intended effect. Onslaught is an indisputable critic of the American war machine, while still gleefully indulging itself and its viewer in the violent glee of bloodshed and venerating its heroes. Along with Iraq and/or Afghanistan vet Celeste, another one of the film’s major players is Josiah (played by Reginald VelJohnson), a Vietnam vet who shares a strong bond with Celeste. Yet, the film can’t decide whether or not it should be critical of their involvement in the American military, as if the U.S. government propagating evil Nazi scientists and going to war overseas are somehow different beasts. The film isn’t interested in tearing apart the military-industrial complex as much as it is vaguely gesturing towards America’s history of evil in global politics. The opening credits sequence seems to indicate a film that is far more punk in its ideals than the film we’re left with. The killing machines sent out on the masses are the work of a literal Nazi, of course, and a slightly too-greedy industrialist, thoroughly separate from the faceless, identityless military that Celeste and Josiah once fought and bled for.
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| Photo via A24. |
What we’re left with is a movie in the middle of an identity crisis. Wingard wants to play it weird, but doens’t quite have the creative spine to keep the freakishness sustained through the whole story. We are treated to scattered, scant moments of truly freakish unruliness, where the carnage of the genres Wingard is toying with comes to life, only for the director to pull his punch by the end. Onslaught is a carcass pieced together from a hundred different sources, a grab-bag of visual references and tonal points of reference, only for it to be bogged down by its need to find some conventionality in it all. The middling family melodrama that the film centres on can’t possibly compete with the enchanting strangeness of many of the other ideas floating around Wingard and Barrett’s heads, only for the most interesting, tantalizing morsels to be denied. Onslaught has moments of hyper-active clarity, but can’t find its aim.
Onslaught is now playing in theatres.
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