Courtesy of A24
A movie titled Onslaught should keep audiences on the edge of their seats, not checking their watches to see how much longer it will last. Director Adam Wingard’s misguided tribute to grindhouse cinema promises a wild, gritty, gonzo action thriller. What it delivers, though, is an exhausting mix of borrowed ideas wrapped in empty style. It barely works as a movie, held together by the idea that recognizing better movies is the same as being entertained. Its only real accomplishment is making some of grindhouse’s worst offerings look like masterpieces by comparison.
Adria Arjona plays Celeste, a former Army sniper who runs a small desert trailer park while dealing with PTSD and being a single mom. Nearby, a shadowy military program has produced three undead super soldiers who escape and eventually turn their sights on the trailer park. Which means Celeste will eventually have to protect her daughter and help her neighbors survive the pending attack. It sounds simple enough, except the movie never makes its central threat feel real. Why were these super soldiers created? Black ops missions? Why would a secret program that’s apparently been operating for years produce only three instead of a whole army? The script offers sinister implications when a few simple, clear-cut answers would have been more useful. That said, a murky threat might be easier to accept if we had a hero worth rooting for.
Unfortunately, we don’t. Arjona’s relentlessly one-note performance doesn’t help matters. She works so hard to project a battle-hardened warrior that it’s obvious she’s acting. Every harsh scowl and death stare feels overly rehearsed. Even worse, Celeste comes off as downright unlikeable, and the movie expects us to excuse her behavior simply because she’s a veteran and a struggling single mom. Those life experiences could make her an interesting character, but here they just feel like shortcuts for sympathy. And the writing never gives us a reason to care if she survives, beyond keeping the plot moving.
Celeste’s relationship with her daughter is especially hollow. She hardly seems like she knows the kid, much less understands how to connect with her. That emotional distance could have given their relationship a real arc, but the movie never develops it into anything meaningful. Instead, the daughter becomes one of the most grating presences onscreen. The movie says Celeste wants to protect her, but it doesn't do enough to make the audience care.
The super soldiers are just as disappointing. For undead killing machines, they don’t have any eerie or supernatural menace. We see so little of them in action, so their terrifying reputation never takes hold, and the people they do dispatch die in unremarkable ways. These so-called unstoppable killing machines move so slowly that their targets have plenty of time to hide and plan. Ordinary civilians take them down with startling ease, and the biggest threat of the bunch goes down far too easily in the final battle. Why should anyone fear these monsters the movie keeps showing are easy to deal with?
Throughout the movie, Wingard repeatedly cuts to a countdown clock, suggesting a brutally relentless showdown is coming between the soldiers and the trailer park residents. But a countdown clock only works if something thrilling is waiting when it reaches zero. When the big confrontation finally arrives, it’s over quickly, and the payoff is underwhelming. Even the synth-heavy score sounds like it’s straining to manufacture excitement the movie doesn’t deliver.
The supporting cast only adds to the overall misery. Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall, and Drew Starkey give genuinely awkward performances that strain so hard for wild energy, but they miss it completely. Even worse, 80s and 90s action and sci-fi veterans Michael Biehn and Reginald VelJohnson pop up in nostalgic cameos, but their talents are completely wasted. No one in the movie gives viewers a reason to care. Eventually, a rooting interest in seeing everyone get taken out begins to form in the hopes that this mess will finally end. For a high-stakes survival thriller, making survival feel like the worst option is quite a feat.
The filmmakers clearly thought they were cooking up something special, tossing out B-movie references as if each one deserved applause. But what they failed to understand is that those Z-grade horror and action movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s were at least entertaining in their own bad way. But this movie doesn’t even manage that. Its forced tough-guy posturing kills the fun, its annoying characters kill our patience, and its lame villains can’t seem to kill much of anything efficiently. It’s hard to find anything to like about this abysmal movie. Its one saving grace is that it’s mercifully short, though getting to the credits still feels like a chore. Onslaught tries to honor classic grindhouse movies, but in the end, even grindhouse cinema deserves better.
Onslaught is currently playing in wide release.