Onslaught Review: Adam Wingard channels John Carpenter in this action flick

PLOT: A PTSD-afflicted former sniper (Adria Arjona) running a trailer park has to protect her daughter when a trio of genetically modified super soldiers escape the underground compound where they are being housed.

REVIEW: I will admit that I walked into Onslaught with sky-high expectations. While I’ve enjoyed director Adam Wingard’s additions to the MonsterVerse, I’ve always been more enamoured with his earlier work, such as You’re Next and — especially — The Guest (which I consider a classic). Onslaught is meant to be a throwback to those movies, and even a quasi-follow-up to the latter, but as much as I love seeing Wingard return to his roots, his return is more of a mixed bag than anticipated.

I think the idea here is: What would happen if Sarah Connor took on Jason Voorhees, and Jason had guns? That’s not a bad premise, but it promises action, and when the confrontation you’ve been building towards for your entire film happens and it falls flat, something is off. Indeed, almost all my problems with Onslaught happen in the final act, with the first two-thirds promising an epic finish Wingard isn’t able to deliver, ending things on an anticlimactic note. He introduces a slew of cool characters but never really does enough with them.

It’s a shame because, for the first two-thirds of its running time, Onslaught purrs. Adam Wingard is going for an old-school John Carpenter vibe, and at moments it really does feel like a lost eighties movie. The world-building is great, with Adria Arjona striking a nice balance between vulnerability and being badass with her damaged character, Celeste. She’s shown to be a bit of a deadbeat, not really being there for her young daughter, with little keeping her sane except her vinyl records, whiskey, and a shitload of guns she’s not supposed to own. She’s surrounded by colourful characters, with the movie being all but stolen by the great Reginald VelJohnson as her neighbour, a heroic ’Nam vet who chain-smokes, dispenses wisdom, and also likes his guns — thankfully for all.

Wingard fave Dan Stevens also shows up as an old Nazi scientist whose experiments for a private firm run by Michael Biehn’s character turn war criminals into indestructible killers they plan to — perhaps — use on the population should the moment call for it. With his white hair, bald pate, and prominently displayed Hitler Youth knife, Stevens chews the scenery, with another Wingard fave, Rebecca Hall, having an extended cameo as his kinky wife. The bad guys, who include Alex Pereira as The Butcher, remain unspeaking monsters very much in the Jason mode, although there are three of them. My big issue is that you expect them to unleash hell, but the violence, when it happens, is tame, with the movie needing (and promising) more carnage than we actually see.

Perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity is Drew Starkey as Cyrus, a killer very much in the mode of Dan Stevens’ character from The Guest. He’s badass but also hilarious, having been interrupted in the midst of a major bender, so he spends the entire movie high on over 100 mg of pure MDMA. It doesn’t hurt his competence, but every once in a while, his brain starts to melt a little bit, giving the film some much-needed humor.

Visually, Onslaught is nice to look at, even if it’s a tad dark and not quite as arresting as The Guest was in that regard. The soundtrack is choice, with Matt Pusti giving us a nice Carpenter-esque score.

In the end, I was frustrated by Onslaught. I wanted to love it, and indeed I actually did love the first hour of the movie, which perfectly sets the stage for an epic showdown between Arjona’s Celeste and The Butcher, but when it happens, it doesn’t even come close to living up to the buildup. The action is a letdown, and a movie that has three unstoppable bad-guy killers in it should have been more explosive. It’s still decent and worth seeing, but for me, it didn’t live up to its promise.