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| Images courtesy A24 |
Director Adam Wingard returns to his formative years with a lower budget tale of unchained super soldiers invading a trailer park in the middle of the desert. After working on the last couple Godzilla movies, he seemed poised to relent and spend more time with the indie genres that defined the earlier part of his career. The result is a muddled mix of good and bad.
With Onslaught, Wingard gives us a spiritual successor to his 2014 film, The Guest. In an unmarked government facility, scientists led by a silly looking Dan Stevens are hard at work developing militant human killers focused on the kill. All havoc breaks loose and the soldiers are released into the wild. The resulting ninety minutes are fused with a pulsating synth score, unrelenting bloodshed and a script that could have used a couple more passes and way more content/context.
Onslaught is definitely a specimen of style over substance. There's a ton of great ideas here but most of them get lost in a film that's more focused on getting to the good parts than fully examining and delivering on what the trailers promised. Onslaught throws so many things at the screen that never stick. Instead, much of it just falls and splats due to its apparent attempt to keep it to a strict ninety minutes. With some more backstory and more defined structure, this has the markings of a grade-A throwback. The action is excellent. The kills are painful. And it appears that most of the visual effects are practical. Wingard gets a high score in those specific areas. But falters at checking all the other boxes.
Unfortunately, for a movie called Onslaught, it makes us sad that the actual onslaught doesn't even start until the final act. It's frustrating. This was promoted as a merciless action vehicle. Instead, audiences are given a hampered movie that just can't find its footing. Most of this is due to a shortened runtime that doesn't allow any breathing room or true story arc. Any interesting characters, namely Rebecca Hall and Dan Stevens' Kammlers are given very little screen time and no defined motive outside of their silly accents. Wasting these two is a crime to cinema in itself.
Somewhere in the beginning phases of Onslaught there were most likely some creative ideas. It just seems that a lot of it got cut to appease audiences with short attention spans and to soothe the grindhouse style he was going for. There is something truly excellent buried in Onslaught. It would be entertaining to one day see what this project could have been with an extended director's cut. There's just not enough to chew on with the film as it stands.
As a quick little action/scifi/horror vehicle, it's a fun watch. But audiences as a whole may be let down but the relatively thin script. Sadly, Wingard seems so caught up in recapturing the essence of far better films in this sub-genre that he strictly emulates instead of creating something fresh and new in his catalog.
-CG