The empty-headed siege pic “Onslaught” might’ve made more sense if it was the late 1980s and the movie began with a Coleco logo. Unfortunately, it’s almost forty years past that recommended serve-by date, and no current events would give meaningful context to this movie’s by-now quaint plot.
Here we follow Celeste (Adria Arjona), a besieged Army sniper, and her trailer park neighbors, including drunk cop Kovacks (Eric Wareheim) and scruffy fellow vet Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) as they fend off a trio of genetically modified ex-soldiers, led by a silent behemoth nicknamed “The Butcher” (Alex Pereira).
Every crowd-pleasing line and contrived setup feels like a prefab evocation of earlier paranoiac war, horror, and sci-fi potboilers that were already riding the coattails of the first two “Terminator“s, as well as “Die Hard,” the first two Rambo movies, and oh yeah, “Halloween” and other stalk-and-slay movies featuring an impassive boogeyman.
A handful of establishing scenes suggest a hyper-compartmentalized post-War-on-Terror conspiracy to mindlessly torture American veterans and target civilians. For example, the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are brought to mind when we see two members of the Butcher’s three-man team trussed up and manacled with their arms over their heads and black bags covering their faces.
It’s still hard to understand why this kind of B-movie thought experiment is being re-presented now when we already have government-sanctioned thugs stalking and brutalizing anyone they can get their hands on. There’s a lot of familiar, sturdy genre movie savvy on display in “Onslaught”, but none of it’s detailed or novel enough to resonate.
To be fair, writer/director Adam Wingard (“Godzilla X Kong: New Empire”) and his co-writer Simon Barrett deliver a fitting companion piece to their militaristic thriller “The Guest,” though this follow-up doesn’t feature any of the same characters. Still, “Onslaught” suffers from the same fundamental problems as its predecessor, in that it teases viewers with better movies of the past without venturing far enough into its storehouse of hoary conventions and pandering cliches.
There aren’t any memorable characters or situations here, just stock types who do exactly what you might expect them to given the rote gestures, predictable situations, and other dramatic shorthand that defines them. Celeste’s a single mom with a cabinet full of high-powered guns, a precocious—meaning smart, but dainty—daughter named Daisy (Blake Kennedy), and PTSD-like symptoms. She’s supported by Josiah, a surly older fella who smokes and over-indulges in bad quips (somehow he doesn’t remind us that he’s gotten too old for this retrograde nonsense); and shrill loudmouth Kovacks, who has his moments, but still leaves the movie exactly like you might expect Wareheim to do.
They meet their match in the Butcher and his gang of merciless killers, who silently make military call signals to each other and then hack and slash their way through whoever using big guns, hatchets, and even a chainsaw. The Butcher’s backed up by a handful of eccentric but elusive handlers, including the bald, cape-wielding German scientist Dr. Kammler (Dan Stevens) and the twitchy albino G-man Cyrus (Drew Starkey). This isn’t an intimately scaled throwback so much as a third-generation Xerox of earlier and more personal visions.
Your response to these characters’ wardrobes, makeup, and accessories will likely determine how much you care for “Onslaught.” Some will enjoy seeing Daisy in a Snow White-style blue dress and red undershirt combo, or “Die Hard” star VelJohnson firing a shotgun after he snarls at the Butcher and his men that they messed with the wrong trailer park, mother****er. There are also some satisfyingly full-throated gore effects, albeit ones that aren’t given a visually striking or dynamic presentation. The sound design is loud and well mixed, and the action choreography is polished. Then again, how much do you want to care when even the tacky-looking bald cap that they slap on Stevens makes him seem like a dedicated actor in a placeholder role?
Maybe the point of this kind of genre exercise is to simply play the hits. Instead of grappling with anything that vaguely resembles our news cycle’s terrors, here’s a more palatable slate of heroes and villains to alternately cheer on and gasp at.
Your mileage may vary, but you might also prefer a few extra minutes of doomscrolling as you watch a talented ensemble cast, as well as a proficient stunt crew, trudge through the motions of a thriller that can’t even nail a character-defining flashback (amateur boxing matches have never seemed so uneventful). It’s not thoughtful or inspired enough to make you care about its paint-by-numbers story beats, and it’s certainly not angry enough to be disarming. But hey, if you’ve seen this type of movie before, the makers of “Onslaught” are betting that you’ll want to see their ersatz rehash, too.
