Del and Mladen review ‘Onslaught’

A24

“Onslaught” Starring Adria Arjonna as Celeste, Dan Stevens as Hans Kammler, Eric Wareheim as Kovacks, Blake Kennedy as Daisy, Michael Biehn as Baylor, Rebecca Hall as Hanna Kammler, Drew Starkey as Cyrus and others. Written by Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard. Directed by Adam Wingard. 1 hour, 32 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: A former Army soldier battles a trio of murderous cyborgs who have escaped a secret corporate test facility.

Spoilers: Of course.

Del’s take

“Onslaught” is the little engine that couldn’t: Is it a grindhouse movie? A quirky, off‑kilter near‑comedy? A siege movie?

It’s none of them, actually. It tries, but fails, and you’ll walk out of the theater feeling the way you do when you leave a sushi restaurant – temporarily full but hungry for a cheeseburger.

The story is about Celeste (Adria Arjonna), an ex-soldier with a world-class case of PTSD who manages a run-down trailer park in the dusty wilds of New Mexico – I’m sorry, I meant “New America,” according to the Kumquat Infection’s latest missive. When she isn’t battling her ex for custody of their daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) she’s grappling with a pantheon of weirdoes living at the park – a cop who drives drunk and never pays his rent, a vet with a hard-on against the VA, an oversexed young couple with tattoos and loud motorcycles, and other members of the fringe who’ve escaped to the desert.

Meanwhile, at a nearby installation occupied by a military subcontractor, an insane, Nazi‑esque scientist by the name Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) is testing his latest creation, an evil troika of ex-soldiers who’ve been modified with computer chips and prosthetics to become compassionless and unstoppable killing machines – in other words, Republicans. As luck would have it, something goes wrong (I didn’t say it was good luck) and the cyborgs escape to wreak havoc on the general population, first at a nearby truck stop, then on to the Windy Oasis Trailer Park. What they don’t know is that awaiting them at the park is another compassionless and unstoppable killing machine in the form of Celeste.

What follows is an orgy of not-very-creative bloodletting that would put Robert Rodriguez to shame, pretty much what you’d expect from a grindhouse-style movie. But there’s something off about “Onslaught” and I haven’t quite put my finger on it. It looks like a grindhouse film but wanders from its focus a little too much to be considered a grindhouse film. For instance, much attention is paid to the quirkiness of its characters (Kammler’s fetishistic sexual appetites and Cyrus’s [Drew Starkey] weird mannerisms), putting “Onslaught” within the orbit of movies like “Iron Sky.” Also, it takes too long and introduces too many subplots to be a siege movie. It’s as if director Wingard wanted it to belong to multiple genres simultaneously and ended up with a movie that belongs to none.

The characters are so thinly sketched I struggled to care about any of them. Celeste’s story is told through flashbacks and apart from one vignette, I couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened to her and what had scarred her, so her current bad luck didn’t resonate with me. The other characters, with the exception of Cyrus, are mere placeholders. Cyrus is not much more – he oscillates between amoral monster and somebody you could possibly have a beer with if you could get past the fact he kills people for a living.

“Onslaught’s” thesis statement – that America’s unholy alliance between government and corporations is transforming the country into a fascist state resembling Nazi Germany – is indifferently expressed. I don’t disagree with the idea but not much attention was paid to what could have been a much larger and more important movie message.

Overall, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before. I liked parts, thought other parts were stupid, and if you ask me for details a month from now I won’t be able to tell you any because the movie is pretty much forgettable.

I’m giving “Onslaught” a C+. I’m all for seeing movies in theaters – once again, Mladen and I were the only two members of the audience – but this one could have waited for streaming.

Mladen’s take

Meet Michael, Jason, and Freddy. No, not the slashers from “Halloween” (1978), “Friday the 13th” (1980), and “Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984) but the Michael‑, Jason‑, and Freddy‑wannabes in “Onslaught.”

Good God, there’s even a shot in “Onslaught” that shows The Frankensteinian Trio standing nearly shoulder‑to‑shoulder while silhouetted at the edge of the trailer park they’re about to annihilate. You could see their breaths as The Not‑Terminators scan the area through their glow‑in‑the‑dark eyeballs like the Furyan Riddick in “Pitch Black” (2000). The one in the middle is holding a cleaver the size of a surfboard. The one on the right, you guessed it, is wielding a chainsaw with a blade as long as my beautiful car. At least the one on the left is packing a SAW. Rat‑a‑tat, motherfucker.

What a crappy movie. Everything about “Onslaught” is derivative, including the notion of bringing soldiers back to life ala 1992’s “Universal Soldier.” The only things that get onslaught‑ed in “Onslaught” are good ideas for dystopian sci‑fi, originality, salient script writing, decency, and likeable characters. What a crappy movie.

“Onslaught” started with promise, if you’re captivated by strangeness as I am. The weirdness is the demented scientist, a third‑generation offspring from the Nazi Party scientists ferreted to America after World War II to help us prepare for World War III.

From the get-go amid the film’s rocking sound effects, rollicking score, and some decent songs, there’s Herr Kammler dropping to his knees to crawl to his wife. To do what? Lick Frau Kammler’s right foot. Come to think of it, maybe I’d lick the Frau’s foot, too, if she’s portrayed by Rebecca Hall, that is.

Unfortunately, after the opening scenes of austere landscapes, shotguns blowing away pumpkins, the wind howling, and the Frau Foot Incident, “Onslaught” degenerates toward, ah, degeneracy. Starkey’s Cyrus, some kind of government or corporate enforcer, is introduced via sadomasochism. Then, the squalid violence takes flight.

There they go, The Trio of Lobotomy, their uniforms ragged like zombie apparel or the ragers in “28 Days Later” (2002), blasting away folks at a truck stop after killing a bunch of private military contractors at a secret test facility in the middle of an arid land.

Frankly, I’m pissed. I suspect the screenwriters simply wanted to put to film a wad of pointless violence but had to disguise the pointlessness somehow. What was the schtick? That a corporation, in cahoots with a fascist U.S. government, is building soulless but fleshy human‑based automatons that kill anyone until commissioned to stop. Apparently, the Not‑Soldiers would be used to suppress civil disobedience and, I imagine, all other forms of disobedience, too.

I don’t know what A24 studio was thinking when it produced “Onslaught.” Everything the movie wants to be, assuming you can determine what that is, never happens. A24 must be embarrassed to list “Onslaught” as part of its portfolio when it includes such magnificent filmmaking as cerebral and transfixing “Ex Machina” (2015), 2019’s absurd and hallucinogenic “The Lighthouse,” and best picture winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022), which introduces us all to the simultaneity of events.

Yeah, “Onslaught” is a D because it would’ve been a much, much better film if it told a story rather than exposing us to a bunch of gratuitous blood splatter.            

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.