Dir: Adam Wingard
Starring: Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Michael Biehn, Drew Starkey, Alex Pereira, Reginald VelJohnson, and Rebecca Hall
Adam Wingard plunges straight back into the chaotic, blood-soaked battlefields of his early days with Onslaught, an adrenaline-fueled kinetic action, horror, sci-fi mashup. Wingard channels the gritty grindhouse stylings of the 1970s and the straight-to-video DNA of fast action films from the 1980s. It’s easy to see the influence of films like Assault on Precinct 13, Universal Soldier, and The Terminator throughout the scenes and among the characters. Wingard bypasses modern style and polish to resurrect an era when wild cinematic premises and unhinged characters ruled the midnight movie screen.
The story begins in an isolated trailer park where a traumatized former soldier (Adria Arjona) and her young daughter (Blake Kennedy) find themselves trapped under a nighttime siege. Three experimental super-soldiers, dragged back from death to serve as modern military technology, tear into their desert community. One lugs a roaring chainsaw, another brandishes an oversized butcher's cleaver, and the third a tactical rifle; together they turn a quiet rural night into a visceral slaughterhouse.
Wingard leans hard into this nostalgic aesthetic, packing the frame with a pulsating synth soundtrack, splattered practical gore, and a keen sense of slasher-cinema characteristics. Dan Stevens, a consistent collaborator of Wingard, chews the scenery as a deranged scientist complete with a Friar Tuck tonsure haircut and a dead-eyed stare, sharing space with an amusing high-on-drugs operative (Drew Starkey), and everyone’s favorite 90s TGIF dad Reginald VelJohnson playing a supportive veteran to everyone in the trailer park. Adria Arjona anchors the violence as Celeste, a sniper battling severe PTSD who struggles with the tender demands of motherhood while operating entirely on primal survival instinct when the moment calls for it. Arjona shines in the quiet family moments and in the big action moments when she takes confident control. Add in three physically intimidating super-soldiers, including UFC heavyweight Alex Pereira, and Onslaught has enough personalities to carry its underwhelming script.
Problems surface when the director tries to stretch this tight, B-movie siege into a sprawling government conspiracy that introduces too many ideas and a few too many characters. The manic corporate cleanup operative, played with style and charm by Drew Starkey, is an interesting character, but he is left to float in and out of scenes with little purpose. The widening mythos tied to Wingard’s earlier cult thriller The Guest ties a great movie into this one, but it never fully connects the dots. Eventually, the pacing stumbles as it tries to juggle too many moving ideas and themes, leaving the final act scrambling to contain a universe that has grown far too big for its runtime.
Even as this film stumbles to find its narrative footing, the sheer gleeful energy and style of Onslaught carry it across the finish line. We rarely see studios support unapologetic, genre-blending midnight movies like this anymore. While everything in Onslaught certainly doesn't work, the film succeeds at creating a genre mashup with bizarre characters and unleashes action sequences with chaotic, gory energy.
Monte’s Rating
3.00 out of 5.00
