I can't believe I'm saying this right now.
In the realm of survival thrillers, true cinematic grit is a currency that must be earned in blood, sweat, and competence. When a film ends with its hero standing triumphant, drenched in viscera, the audience needs to believe that their survival was atleast somewhat down to their own ingenuity and/or skill, not just a flurry of cosmic accidents that constantly intervene for the sake of the film lasting its runtime. "Onslaught," the latest effort from director Adam Wingard, fundamentally misunderstands what makes a film like this work. Billed as a triumphant return to the roots that birthed his modern masterpiece The Guest, Wingard’s departure from the blockbuster realm of giant apes and radioactive lizards should have been a homecoming. Instead, it's a hollow, frustrating exercise in stylistic posturing.
The film’s agonizing first thirty minutes operate as a thinly written exposition dump, meant to build out a mythos for its genetically engineered super soldiers while introducing our lead, Celeste. Played by Adria Arjona, Celeste is ostensibly a hardened military sniper willing to put it all on the line to save her daughter. Arjona pours genuine fire into the role, doing everything in her power to elevate a character whose entire personality begins and ends at being a "badass mom." The marketing sold us a lethal, hyper-competent veteran whose gonna slay from start to finish.
SPOILERS:
The reality we get on screen is a protagonist who nearly dies twice before she even manages to neutralize a single threat. If it weren't for the bafflingly timed interventions of her neighbors—including an entirely wasted Reginald VelJohnson—she would have been a desert stain before the end of the second act.
SPOILERS OVER:
I mean, I get it... it's a weak attempt at portraying the female character in a "realistic human light," Ie, she's not a super soldier, or a robot, she's flawed and will make mistakes. Bla bla.
However, this reliance on neighborly salvation makes the film’s climax unintentionally comedic. By the time the dust settles and our heroine is caked in the requisite layers of gore, she adopts the weary, tough-guy swagger of someone radiating a profound "Yeah, that was me, I messed them up" energy. It's utterly, hilariously unearned. This disconnect points directly to the deeply flawed screenplay co-written by Bartlett and Wingard, and the latter's mismanaged direction. The entire affair feels less like a thoughtful piece of genre cinema and more like a script penned by a disgruntled, hyper-macho Texan war veteran who simply swapped a male protagonist for a female one at the eleventh hour because he thought the optics made it sound cooler in his head.
For a movie desperate to wear its grindhouse influences on its blood-soaked sleeve, there are perhaps two or three genuinely satisfying dispatches. The rest of the carnage is a messy blur, punctuated by a senseless, mean-spirited massacre in a supermarket that adds absolutely zero narrative weight. It exists solely as an excuse for the filmmakers to proudly declare how "extreme" they are. Even the body horror elements, which should have provided a visceral punch to the gut, feel so minimal and disconnected that they land with all the impact of a wet sponge, operating on pure, unadulterated shock value.
Then there's the matter of the film’s travelling man. In a truly baffling creative choice, we're subjected to a CIA agent whose not so much a good guy or a villain—who seems aggressively determined to do a bargain-bin impression of Gary Oldman in Léon: The Professional. He contributes functionally nothing to the narrative. He just drives around, turns up, mutters some bullsh*t, acts like a weirdo, and evaporates into the background as a practically pointless character. The single, undeniable saving grace of this entire endeavor is the banging synth score, a pulsating retro triumph that stubbornly belongs in a much better movie.
The tragedy of "Onslaught" is that the loose bones of a solid foundation are buried somewhere beneath the rubble. It's agonizing for anyone who considers The Guest an all-time classic to watch its creators return to their stomping grounds only to deliver this. Instead of a sharp, stylish thriller, we are handed a movie so desperately eager to be perceived as cool and extreme that it entirely forgets to do the work required to actually be either.
4/10
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