A bad ass heroine gets overshadowed by wall-to-wall violence.
“Onslaught” is a movie that wants to be in some parallel dimension where Quentin Tarantino made his own version of “Civil War” and added iconic villains like Jason Vorhees in the mix. You’d have a movie with a lot of action, a lot of violence, a lot of stars, and a lot of stuff. And I think maybe every once in a while, there can be too much of a good thing. “Onslaught” may be too much of a good thing.
Adria Ajona plays a war vet named Celeste, who spends her days shooting pumpkins in the desert, and finds out at the last minute that her ex (Jacob Scipio) is making her daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) stay with her while he’s called away on business. In fact, given her hermit life and PTSD, he’s poised to take full custody of Daisy. And like Mindy calling her mother “Lady” on “Animaniacs,” she calls her mother “Ma’am.” But Celeste tells her to call her “Mom” or whatever suits her, and she tells her to doesn’t need to act all ladylike.
Dan Stevens is nearly unrecognizable with a bald cap, white hair, looking blind in one eye, and dressing in a white suit like he’s trying to splice Marlon Brando’s Jor-El with Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker” and Erich von Stroheim in “Sunset Boulevard.” He plays a German doctor developing super soldiers out of ex-soldiers-some of them are supposed to be dead-who are programmed to slaughtered anyone in their paths. “A human equivalent to a heat seeker,” as he refers them to.
Just as Celeste has enough problems, these super soldiers end up in her area. At times, they stand in the distance like they’re in another parallel universe where Wes Anderson directed spaghetti westerns (I think I saw some dogs stand like that in Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs”), and other times, they have knives, guns, and chainsaws to take out anyone in their paths. But luckily for Celeste and Daisy, they also has some alleys in the form of her trailer park neighbors: another war vet (Reginald VelJohnson A.K.A Carl Winslow of “Family Matters” and A.K.A. Sgt. Al Powell of “Die Hard”) and a bumbling cop (Eric Wareheim of “Tim & Eric” fame). So you would think: “Awesome Movie. Great Job.” Think again.
I wanted to like “Onslaught” because of how the super soldiers were designed and created, how Ajona has the right kind of attitude to remind us of Sigourney Weaver in “Alien” or Michelle Rodriguez in the “Fast & Furious” movies, and how director Adam Wingard brings it all together. But the screenplay by him and his frequent collaborator Simon Barrett doesn’t give much credit where credit is due. It’s all exhausting and perfunctory with the carnage and mayhem, as if it was trying to study from the books of “Kill Bill” or “Natural Born Killers,” and loses the essence of this films.
I’m told this movie is a spiritual sequel to Wingard’s “The Guest” and “You’re Next,” but there’s more violence than there is character development. We know the main heroine is a soldier, who pins her arm as a coping mechanism for her PTSD, and we know she is a mother caught in a custody battle. But the more fights and action we get, the more we appreciate that Michael Bay had nothing to do with this. “Onslaught,” which also has Rebecca Hall, Drew Starsky, and Michael Biehn in the cast, has a lot of ambition in Wingard’s world, but a world like his needs some expanding. And we know that when secret government weapons get loose, you better hope you take the deal of keeping quiet.
