Adam Wingard’s Onslaught should have been a slam-dunk. Reuniting Wingard with the other members of the brain trust behind The Guest — one of the best genre pictures of the ‘10s, for my money – including writer Simon Barrett and star Dan Stevens, it’s pitched as a kind of return to his roots in lower-budget action-horror work, and, at 92 minutes, it’s something that film wasn’t, in that it’s easy on the bladder. A24 certainly wants you to know it’s a lot like The Guest, with Wingard, who is currently rocking a beard that would make a Civil War general feel low-T, and the cast doing conspiracy-themed bits for the studio’s Instagram feed that come off as if the Onion’s Infowars got into doing the LadBible/FirstWeFeast celeb-banter game.
This is a lot to live up to, and it’s a lot of added pressure that Wingard and company didn’t have during the first go-round. The Guest could surprise you as a cheap same-day VOD rental; Onslaught is pretty much the only thing going up against Peter Parker at the Labor Day box office. The stakes are different, and, despite anchoring a major franchise for the better part of the decade, Wingard’s not up to the task this time.
The problems begin early enough – I start to sweat as soon as I see the John Carpenter font on any modern genre production’s title cards – and continue all the way through until the credits. Basically, Wingard’s made his modern-day siege movie: a trailer park Precinct 13, where a gang of resident misfits is beset by three surgically altered super-soldiers who have escaped from the government facility where they were created. The film opens with a bang, or, more accurately, a few magazines’ worth of them: Celeste (Adria Arjona), the park’s super and a former Army sniper, does some jack-o’-lantern target shooting away from the grounds. As she’s finishing up, she notices a black helicopter flying low and puzzles over it for a minute. It’s making its way to an old army base nearby, but what could it be carrying?
If you had “a decrepit Nazi scientist” as your answer, you’d be right on the money. Dr. Hans Kammler (Stevens, dressed like Ernst Stavro Blofeld and whose ability to speak German Wingard fumbles for whatever reason) has been employed by the US Government for decades, tasked with creating the perfect killing machines, and he’s just hit a breakthrough. He’s altered three war-criminal grunts’ brains, and made them both impervious to pain and completely without conscience. If it’s in the way of their mission, they’ll kill it. In a sitcom-level inciting incident, Kammler’s boss (Michael Biehn) shows up and puts a squad of his best men in a showdown with the test subjects– only for the three super-soldiers to go into cardiac arrest. Of course they’re just playing possum, but no one on site will know that fact until it’s far, far too late.
Meanwhile, back at the trailer park, Celeste is dealing with problems of her own. The punk kids are bothering their cop neighbor (Eric Wareheim), the generator’s going out, and her ex-husband has unexpectedly stuck her with their daughter, Daisy (Blake Kennedy), while he goes out of town on business. Daisy’s one of those hyper-mature kids who grew up nice and quick in the shadow of her parents’ divorce, and took on the appearance of adulthood to pick up her mom’s slack. In a weirdly affecting sequence that occurs right when she arrives at Celeste’s trailer, she notices the stack of dishes in the sink and promptly sets up a little workstation – a small jukebox playing meditative tapes, a framed picture of a cat wearing a bowtie, and so on – and gets to work cleaning up her mother’s mess, all while Celeste is outside committing simple assault (and some light battery) on her former spouse.
The only person in the park who seems to know what Celeste is going through is Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), a kindly old ‘Nam vet who is as tough as the coffin nails he smokes are on his lungs. We don’t really get to know many more of the inhabitants – they’re just cannon fodder, anyhow, with one left to cook on a grill after one of the tac-armored UFC fighters puts a bullet through his brain – so our core four are mother, daughter, cop, and vet against the three-man wrecking crew. Oh, and there’s a government agent (Drew Starkey) on the way, though he’s rolling on some MDMA and having a pretty bad time. Don’t ask.
If this sounds to you like a typical deadbeat-parent-proving-their-worth fantasy, you’ve got pretty good hearing, because it’s exactly that. Wingard and Barrett never get us fully on Celeste’s side, nor do they give her detail as heart-wrenching as they do for her daughter – we’re mostly limited to black-and-white slow-motion flashbacks to her time in combat, dodging explosions and watching brothers-in-arms hit the ground – and the moments in which she tries to bond with her kid are about as bad as the ones Stallone had with his in Over the Top. When your closest heart-to-hearts are about the proper way to eat a gas station burrito and about that time you kicked one of your army buddies in the nuts when your unit did a “fight club,” you might have written a caricature rather than a character. Her one useful attribute – the fact that she’s really good with guns and owns a lot of them – is left on the table, aside from a single well-timed headshot with a rifle that isn’t even hers. There isn’t really a competent defense, either, and the park denizens’ plan is mostly just to hope that the supposed killing machines are somehow dumber than they are.
They’re right, in fact: these are probably the worst super-soldier villains in a genre homage piece I’ve seen in some time, with Wingard and Barrett seemingly going out of their way to blunt their impact outside of the costuming. Dressed like abandoned Halloween-season Call of Duty: Warzone skins, their intimidation factor is significantly negated by how little we see of them in action and how bland what we do see is. They annihilate an entire squad of elite troops and a truck stop minimart in a surprisingly ho-hum fashion – the latter, it seems, solely so Wingard can film them riding in a stolen big rig and so that Starkey can show that the Government Isn’t Playing Games by capping the lone survivor during his investigation – and they fold pretty quickly when they arrive at the trailer park. That siege, by the way, happens nearly an hour into the movie and resolves relatively quickly after a remarkably dumb twist, though they do give our leads plenty of time to hide out and chat after one or two initial spurts of violence. They have to give Celeste that cut above her eye so that she can wear that badass makeshift eyepatch! You know, because it looks cool!
Such is the problem with trying to make a movie like The Guest without replicating what made The Guest work. There’s no central mystery or hook for the audience to latch on to, nor do Wingard and Barrett have the patience to spread out their reveals while rushing along to that “big showdown” in the third act. The cast is uniformly good at what they’re tasked to do – including Arjona, who is let down by the writing at every turn but keeps Celeste from being a truly boring protagonist by sheer ferocity – with VelJohnson* and Starkey being particular standouts, but they’re suffocated by the stop-and-start momentum of the story. The score feels like it’s building to a “Head Like a Hole” needle drop that never comes, and all of that vaunted “conspiracy” talk mostly extends to topics that would have felt passe in 2007. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has been in a drawer for that long, either, because it feels like it was written right after someone saw Planet Terror in the Grindhouse double-feature and thought they could do better. Which is fair – someone probably could do better than that! – but it’s as if it’s stayed in stasis since then.
Yet, the main problem is that Wingard seems to perceive Onslaught as pastiche in a way that he didn’t with his other films – the man did two Godzilla vs. Kong movies and did so without wholly compromising his identity as a filmmaker** — and bad pastiche fails both the present-day viewer and the works the film is supposedly paying homage to. The genuinely nuts ‘80s features Wingard cites here had an element of unrestrained lunacy and a fearlessness he can’t replicate, and he’s not willing to use the framework to create something new like some of his peers are (Panos Cosmatos, for one, whose Mandy seems to be echoed here without any of its style or substance). Had Onslaught been released alongside the films it so desperately wants to be lined up with on the Blockbuster racks, it’d still be there at closing time, and eventually be consigned to the sale tapes bin with Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins and Club Paradise. It’d be the make-or-break question at a movie-themed bar trivia night, and no one would answer correctly. Beyond any hypotheticals, Onslaught will be out like white clothes – made passe immediately after Labor Day.
* Seriously, Carl Winslow got the biggest reactions from my crowd, and each one of them was earned fairly. Please, Mr. VelJohnson – do more movies like this.
** This is, after all, a man who managed to make the King of the Monsters give the 8th Wonder of the World a full-on German Suplex in front of the Pyramids of Giza.