Adam Wingard’s new action-thriller Onslaught is quirky, weird, violent, and vibing with style—substance is not its forte, however.
Onslaught begins with Dan Stevens playing an old, half-blind German scientist because, of course. He crawls to his decadent wife (Rebecca Hall) and licks her feet, then is whisked away by helicopter to a secret military base where he is working on three half-dead, half-mindless super soldiers. It’s an intriguing, strange opening—and we never see him and his wife together again, their whole relationship a red herring.
After the soldiers escape and go on a relentless killing spree—dare I say “onslaught?”—a government agent is dragged from a BDSM brothel and spends the rest of the movie looking at crime scenes, still tripping on molly. He otherwise does nothing, his character another red herring.
And so it goes with Onslaught, an action film that edges into horror that is almost really badass but never actually goes anywhere. It’s a bunch of strange ideas juxtaposed together with spit and tape, the end result semi-forming a movie—just not a fully realized one.
The film’s protagonist, played by ever-cutthroat Adria Arjona, has things to do, but only in the film’s final 25 minutes does she get to kick into gear and actually do what the movie’s marketing promised. The climactic battle scene is pretty fun, violent, and gory—it’s what you would expect if Leatherface were also a trained Navy Seal—but it comes so late it doesn’t feel like you’re at the conclusion to the movie. In fact, Onslaught plays more like the first act of a story that was never completed.
In my positive review of Wingard’s 2014 comedy-thriller The Guest, I described it as “a fun little film that, strangely, requires you to accept it for what it is. Go in expecting a full-on action movie and you’ll be disappointed.”
I should have heeded that same advice for Onslaught. It is indeed entertaining, and it’s short (90 minutes, thank the Lord Jesus!), the action is killer, and the rest of the movie is amusingly weird.
But the sum is less than the parts, a bunch of fun ideas thrust together into an intoxicating but unfulfilling orgy of strangeness.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.