‘Onslaught’ Review – A Modern Grindhouse Film

Onslaught is essentially a love letter to the grimy action movies and grindhouse pictures of the 1980s. Written and directed by Adam Winguard, it is basically about how a secret government program creates genetically engineered super soldiers, those soldiers escape into the desert and go on a killing spree, and an Army sniper named Celeste (Adria Arjona) is forced to protect her young daughter while everything around her descends into absolute chaos. It is a gloriously ridiculous premise, and Wingard embraces the absurdity rather than trying to make it seem more respectable than it is. The problem is that the movie is much more successful as a collection of violent set pieces than it is as an actual story.

Before we get into that, lets talk about how amazing Adria Arjona is. She is a terrific action lead and her Celeste is exactly the kind of character you want at the center of a movie like this, and Arjona completely sells her physicality. She looks like she could actually beat the hell out of someone, and the film gives her plenty of opportunities to prove it. The fight choreography is brutal and inventive with Wingard clearly more interested in making every punch hurt than in keeping things clean and polished. Watching Arjona throw herself into these sequences is easily one of the movie’s greatest pleasures.

Unfortunately, Celeste isn’t given enough character development beyond being a badass mother trying to protect her daughter. The movie establishes the basic emotional stakes, but it doesn’t spend enough time developing them. Considering how short Onslaught is, this becomes a recurring problem. The film moves so quickly from one violent encounter to the next that there isn’t much room for the characters to become more than their immediate functions in the story—which is fine, I guess. Fleshing out characters isn’t really the goal and it’s main function is to be a bloody good time, which is very true. It’s just annoying at how nearly one dimensional our lead is. Still though, she is a badass.

That 90-minute runtime is probably the biggest issue with the film. There is absolutely something appealing about a movie that gets in, causes as much damage as possible and gets out before overstaying its welcome, but Onslaught goes too far in the other direction. I kept wishing it were another 20 or 30 minutes longer. There are so many ideas here that could have been developed into something much more interesting, particularly the government conspiracy. Instead, a lot of it remains frustratingly vague.

It’s understandable why Wingard and writer Simon Barrett might want to keep the government side of the story mysterious. Conspiracy stories benefit from a certain amount of uncertainty and ambiguity, and Onslaught clearly doesn’t want to explain every detail of its world. But there is a difference between leaving something mysterious and simply not giving the audience enough information to care about it. Here, I often felt like I was waiting for the movie to finally explain what was actually happening.

Drew Starkey’s Cyrus is caught in the middle of that problem. I actually like the character and Starkey gives him some personality, but his role is ultimately underwhelming. He is essentially a government cleanup guy, arriving at crime scenes after the super soldiers have done their damage and trying to figure out what happened. That is a cool idea for a character, especially in a movie built around government conspiracies, but he mostly goes from one crime scene to another without getting enough to do.

Starkey is still one of the movie’s standouts, though, alongside Dan Stevens. Speaking of! Stevens is having a ridiculous amount of fun as the German doctor, Hans Kammler, and every second he is on screen is better because of it. The character is an albino scientist with a bald head, long white hair around the sides and back whose first appearance is licking the feet of Rebacca Hall and the general appearance of someone who should probably never be allowed within 500 feet of a government laboratory. His introduction is completely unhinged and unsettling, and Stevens plays him with such confidence that it becomes impossible not to watch him. I wish he were in the movie more.

The same goes for Rebecca Hall, although for very different reasons. Hall is an excellent actor who can bring an enormous amount of weight to even limited material, but Onslaught barely gives her anything to work with. Her character is surrounded by so much ambiguity that it becomes difficult to understand what the movie actually wants us to think about her. She feels like someone who was supposed to have a much larger role in an earlier version of the screenplay.

The movie’s real star, however, is the violence and, my lord, Wingard does not hold back. The super soldiers are terrifying largely because of how physically unstoppable they feel, and the action has the dirty, nasty quality of grindhouse filmmaking. There is a real sense of impact to the fights, with bodies getting thrown around and characters taking punishment that would put a normal person in the hospital for the rest of their life. The film wants you to wince and boy will you.

When Onslaught is focused on that, it works. When it has to stop and explain itself, it becomes considerably less interesting. That unevenness is what ultimately kept me from loving the movie. The action is great, the violence is great, Arjona is great, Stevens is having a blast and the whole thing has an infectious “how the hell did they come up with this?” quality. But almost everything surrounding those elements feels underdeveloped. The characters aren’t given enough time, the government conspiracy is too vague, the mythology is barely explored and the emotional material never hits as hard as it should.

There are also moments where the movie’s deliberate campiness works beautifully and others where it simply feels dull. Onslaught is trying to recreate the excess of older exploitation movies, but recreating their aesthetic doesn’t automatically recreate their energy. Some scenes feel like they are waiting for the next action sequence to start.

That is the frustrating part because there is a genuinely entertaining movie buried inside Onslaught. The ingredients are all there where you have a badass mother, genetically engineered killing machines, a shady government program, a completely deranged scientist, a mysterious cleanup operative and enough bloodshed to fill several movies. It should be a slam dunk. Instead, it is a very uneven experience that feels like it needed more time to become the movie it is clearly trying to be. 

Still, I can’t deny that I had fun watching it. It is definitely refreshing about a film this committed to being completely ridiculous and wanting to provide a great time to it’s audience. It doesn’t seem particularly interested in explaining away its absurdity, and some of the strangest choices are exactly what make it memorable. When Dan Stevens is onscreen being a lunatic, when Arjona is beating the living hell out of someone, or when Wingard lets the violence completely take over, Onslaught comes alive. I just wish the rest of the movie could keep up.

Onslaught is a messy and far too short action movie that has enough personality to keep it from being a total disappointment. The action delivers and mixes well with how nasty the violence is and Arjona proves she can absolutely carry this kind of movie but the story is razor thin and the characters needed more development and the government conspiracy is so vague that it frequently feels like the movie forgot to finish explaining itself. There is a great midnight movie here and if you can forget all the cons I had mentioned you will have a great time. For me though and as a reviewer, while I did have fun there is just too much to dislike than to like at times.