I’m not sure if “Onslaught” is trying to make a political statement, which is kind of the problem. On the one hand, it seems to be paying homage to blood-spattered B-movies of the 1980s, with a gleeful enjoyment in its bloodshed. On the other, it’s about a government waging forever wars and exploiting its veterans. So, hard to say.
Or is it? A film needn’t make overt partisan statements to be political, and “Onslaught” suggests early on that it’s preoccupied with the present. A brash backward-running montage under the opening credits strings together footage of presidents from Obama to Wilson talking about the necessity of war with news clips suggesting an ulterior motive. We see a headline about Nazi scientists being brought to the United States after World War II, which becomes important when the creepy, kinky German scientist Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) is described as a “third-generation Paperclip.”
So that’s the setup: This pasty white guy, who for some reason we meet as he’s crawling on the floor to submissively lick the feet of his wife (Rebecca Hall), has been working for a defense contractor somewhere out in the desert to mutate traumatized soldiers into conscience-free killing machines. “The human equivalent of a heat-seeking missile,” he calls the masked and mindless men. Once activated, they will kill any living being in their path. Naturally, they get loose.
The story’s other thread has to do with the ex-Marine sniper Celeste (an excellent Adria Arjona), a single mom to Daisy (Blake Kennedy). She manages a trailer park near a supposedly abandoned military complex and lives with flashbacks from her combat days. She has a locked cabinet full of guns. You can see the clash coming.
The director Adam Wingard, who wrote the screenplay with Simon Barrett, has said that this movie takes place in the same universe as his films “You’re Next” and “The Guest.” Of course, he gets to say that (even if Stevens was also in “The Guest,” playing an entirely different character). But it’s a disappointment to see what made those films interesting — a sense of restraint and a balance of gore and character development — disappear here. Celeste’s one defining feature is her trauma. And we get so much grimy and gross violence that even relatively hardened viewers (like me) might find themselves closing their eyes.
Similarly, the two most sinister characters, the scientist and a government operative (Drew Starkey), are introduced in terms of one trait — they’re weird sexual deviants, framed in a way calculated to generate a kind of curious disgust — and while characters don’t need a backstory, having one would go a long way toward making them interesting.
At its best, “Onslaught” uses its overblown butchery to underline carnage of another kind, the sort that soldiers experience both on the battlefield and when they return home. The movie’s position is well-taken, if well-trodden: The government doesn’t really care about the people who fill the boots on the ground. They’re expendable. And so, by implication, are civilians. What matters is having the best fighting machine, and that would require a removal of identity, conscience and consciousness. In the age of drone and A.I.-powered warfare — and masked law enforcement — the metaphor is not exactly subtle.
It’s difficult to make a movie like that without reveling in the slaughter, and Wingard hardly seems to try. I expect to hear “Onslaught” described as fun. But I was ready to bail after 15 minutes. I didn’t — and there’s some satisfaction to watching Celeste kick butt with her neighbors — but I wasn’t glad to have sat through it.
The reason, I guess, is I don’t have to imagine what it looks like when a government unleashes its forces on civilians, accidentally or otherwise. Every week brings a new story from one place or another about officially sanctioned terror in the streets. The perpetrators might not be chainsaw-wielding and lobotomized, but that doesn’t really matter in the end. Furthermore, the worst people in the film are visually coded as bizarro neo-Nazis with all the blood drained from their faces. But in the real world, the offenders often look and act like anyone else.
If “Onslaught” had something insightful knocking around in its brain, I might have felt differently. But promising viewers violence and then getting distracted by style over any substance while pretending to make a serious point feels icky. Perhaps that’s just the moment we’re living in; I tend to think it betrays an absence of imagination about what a movie can do. At minimum, if you’re going to build a weird world, make it one that audiences can dwell in a little while beyond the bloodshed. To fail to do so is its own kind of political statement.
Onslaught Rated R for copious violence and language, plus a scene in a kinky sex club that shows plenty. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.
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