Onslaught Promises a Bloodbath but Never Quite Pulls the Trigger

I was ready for Onslaught. Adam Wingard going back to a smaller movie after spending years playing with Kong sounded like exactly what I wanted from him. I like Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire well enough because those movies delivered what I went to them for. Giant monsters hit each other, things got destroyed and Wingard did it well. But You’re Next and The Guest are different. Those movies feel like Wingard doing his own thing, and there’s an energy to them that has always stuck with me.

Onslaught feels like Wingard trying to go back there. The grindhouse influence is all over it, from the synth-heavy throwback attitude to the genetically engineered killers stalking around the desert. There are moments when it feels like this thing is about to turn into exactly the nasty little movie I wanted it to be. The problem is that it never really hits high gear.

Adria Arjona plays Celeste, a former Army sniper trying to protect her daughter when a group of genetically engineered super soldiers gets loose. Arjona is good in the role. I believed her physically and never had a problem accepting her as the person who could fight back when everything went bad. What I was missing was enough of Celeste herself to really make me care about whether she made it through.

There’s war and tragedy in her past and the movie gives us pieces of it, but there never felt like there was enough there for me to really latch onto her. Compare that to You’re Next. I rooted for Erin. There was something about her beyond simply being capable that made watching her turn the tables so satisfying. The same thing happened with the kids in The Guest. They felt like actual people I wanted to see survive what was happening around them. With Celeste, I understood that I was supposed to be invested, but I never completely got there.

Oddly enough, I liked the daughter more. Kids can be a problem in movies like this because too often their entire purpose is to make stupid decisions and force the adults to save them. She never got in the way of Onslaught. I enjoyed having her around, and she gave the movie some personality when Celeste herself could have used more of it.

The killers work better visually than they do as characters. They have this great Call of Duty gone wrong look, all tactical gear and military hardware, but Wingard shoots them like monsters. Keeping them in the shadows and letting those glowing eyes emerge from the darkness is one of the better visual choices in the movie. For a while, that’s enough to make them feel genuinely threatening.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much behind the look. The movie eventually gives them a connection that is clearly supposed to make everything feel bigger and more important, but it feels tacked on instead of earned. Wingard makes them look dangerous. The movie never manages to make them particularly interesting.

That problem keeps coming up throughout Onslaught. The movie introduces something that makes me think, “Okay, I want to see where this goes,” and then it doesn’t go far enough with it.

Drew Starkey’s cleanup guy might be the best example. His introduction is bizarre enough that I immediately wanted to know more about this lunatic and what he was going to bring to the movie. Then he never really lives up to that introduction. Rebecca Hall and Dan Stevens are another strange addition as a very interesting couple who could have added another level of weirdness to the whole thing, but neither of them is around long enough to really move anything.

I did enjoy seeing Michael Biehn and Reginald VelJohnson again. VelJohnson especially made me laugh for a completely unrelated reason. I had literally seen a clip of him on Instagram the day before watching this and thought to myself, “I miss that guy. Is he still around?” I never bothered looking it up. Apparently I didn’t have to. Onslaught answered the question for me the next night.

All of those faces and personalities give the movie flavor, but once again I wanted more. That might be the easiest way to explain my entire reaction to Onslaught: I kept wanting more of everything it was already giving me.

That includes the violence.

There are plenty of bodies in this movie. On paper, the body count probably sounds exactly like what you would expect from something called Onslaught. The problem is that too much of it happens off screen. For something leaning this hard into grindhouse and B-movie excess, I kept waiting for Wingard to stop holding back and really let the movie get filthy.

Instead, the film burns through a lot of its cannon fodder surprisingly early. By the time we get to the ending, which should be the moment where everything finally goes completely insane, it feels like there aren’t enough pieces left on the board. The grand finale should be where Onslaught earns its title. It should be bigger, nastier and more outrageous than everything that came before it. Instead, it feels undercooked.

That’s what frustrated me because I did like the movie. There are good ideas all over it. The killers look cool. The photography works. There are actors I enjoyed watching. The daughter is good. Wingard clearly understands the movies he is paying homage to, and there are stretches where that old grindhouse feeling is right there.

But Onslaught is full of things that stop one step short of becoming great. The lead needed more character. The supporting cast needed more time. The weird cleanup guy needed an actual payoff. The killers needed something behind the glowing eyes. The body count needed to happen in front of us instead of somewhere around the corner. Most importantly, the ending needed to be the moment when Wingard finally took his foot off the brake.

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to his earlier movies. You’re Next and The Guest never felt like Wingard trying to remind me of another era. They felt like Wingard making movies that other people would eventually look back on. Even his Kong movies knew exactly what they were and delivered what I came to see.

Onslaught feels like Wingard looking backward instead, trying to grab hold of the kind of dirty, nasty genre movie that clearly means something to him. I could feel what he was reaching for, and there were enough flashes of it that I kept waiting for the movie to finally become that thing.

It never does.

Maybe that’s the problem with going back. The past is never quite the way you remember it, and the harder you try to hold onto a memory, the more it seems to slip away.

For a movie called Onslaught, I expected it to go out swinging. Instead, it too fades.