Joel on Film

Onslaught has a pretty lofty sense of its own momentum. In theory, the movie is a pedal-to-the-metal action-thriller about a mother, who is also a veteran and a formidable sniper, fending off an attack by three, allegedly unstoppable killing machines, whose first scene of real “action” is the massacre of a bunch of innocent people in a convenience mart. There is some build-up to that, though, and all that Simon Barrett’s screenplay is able to accomplish is some routine characterizations, a paper-thin narrative, and more distractions to get to its simple goal than one might be expecting.

In fact, the biggest disappointment here is that trio of merciless killers, who are so built-up, only to fall well short of any expectations, that we must remember the danger of being swallowed by one’s own hype. We watch the centerpiece sequence—a chase through a trailer park—and acknowledge that, yes, these three, glowing-eyed men are intimidating. Yes, it’s a little crazy how one of them wields a chainsaw to achieve a kill, but then again, that guy ends up wielding that particular chainsaw for the rest of his screen time.

It’s not all that funny, though, and one can’t help but wonder whether Adam Wingard’s direction might have benefitted from some sense of humor. Instead of injecting the proceedings with jokes, though, the filmmakers provide a nondescript attitude, a vague atmosphere and a lot of exposition via some needless supporting characters who don’t really add anything. What Wingard absolutely does have as a positive attribute is the protagonist: She’s Celeste (Adria Arjona, fitting the role of a badass with posture), whose past in the military has a surprising and thoroughly unbelievable connection to the current carnage.

That involves three hulking operatives played—in order of importance—by Alex Pereira, Tyler Hall and Dave Campbell, each of whom has a single defining characteristic and the first of whom is given a kernel of backstory by the end. They’re the playthings of a mysterious woman named Hanna (Rebecca Hall) and her half-blind albino husband Hans Kammler (an unrecognizable Dan Stevens), who are at the helm of some mysterious government project. That project, according to some of the marketing material, ties back to two previous films directed by Wingard, although this feeble attempt at a cinematic universe doesn’t even mention any of the elements of those movies, making the entire thing rather moot.

What matters to us is the here-and-now, when Celeste and her daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy), who is suddenly dropped at mom’s trailer park for a few days while dad’s away, are caught in the middle of the government’s latest period of testing the operatives. The emotional content of these two characters is essentially unimportant to Barrett and Wingard, though for us they become something to latch onto while they hide or run or dive out of the way of a gunfire flurry. That happens more or less because the two barely missed the convenience-mart massacre and one of the operatives (it’s useless to figure out who, because they all counterproductively look exactly the same) noticed Celeste’s truck driving away.

Back at the trailer park, Celeste battens down the hatches with a couple of other characters who might as well be entirely disposable. One is a cop played by Eric Wareheim as a complete, stupid idiot until the moment he’s allowed to rally, and the other is a curmudgeonly neighbor played by Reginald VelJohnson, who is also a veteran of the United States military and, at least, gets a few good shots off and a couple of 12-letter expletives to yell out the window. Some potential resides on the other side of this fight in a fixer played by Drew Starkey, but then he just gets high on MDMA and the performance becomes a series of fidgets and twitches.

This is not much in the way of personality before the wholly anticlimactic showdown, which gives Celeste all the good stuff to do and the operatives more and more chances to demonstrate how clumsy and generally underwhelming they are at their jobs. One might argue that that makes Onslaught a secret slapstick comedy, but it would be too much to hope, given that the falsely inflated sense of internal momentum actually translates to mildly diverting bursts of bloody violence interrupted by flashbacks and exposition and a sense of routine.

Rating: ** (out of ****)