Onslaught review

I hated Onslaught. You can stop reading now, if all you wanted was my verdict. It's a no from me dawg.

This film lost me pretty early. Adria Arjona plays Celeste, a former military woman who's clearly been through some things and is now living in a trailer park in the middle of the desert near a military base. Celeste is in a bad place, she's caught up in conspiracy theories about what they're doing at the base, she's got loaded guns all around her house, she's getting drunk and wasted on a regular basis, and her place is filthy. Then her ex randomly drops their six-year-old daughter off with her for the weekend, and almost immediately I realized I was done with the protagonist.

This little girl was so obviously and completely over her mother's shit, and so was I. Her dad has basically ditched her at her mom's house because he had something else to do that weekend, and I'm over his shit too. You cannot leave a six-year-old in a house full of drugs, alcohol and guns with a woman who is clearly not doing well because you have other plans. Every time that little girl looked at her mother like she was tired of dealing with this nonsense, I was right there with her. She basically became my avatar for the movie.

So by the time we get to the actual plot, I've already got a problem. I'm supposed to be invested in Celeste, and instead I'm sitting there agreeing with her six-year-old about how exhausting she is. Then the antagonists show up, and they're actual Nazis. We're back to fucking actual Nazis. The movie basically tells us these are third-generation Operation Paperclip people, so the United States brought Nazi scientists over after World War II and somehow 80 fucking years later this line of research is still at the forefront of science and has produced these super soldiers.

And what did we get from 80 years of Nazi research? Murderous automatons that kill everything they come across. That's basically what they were designed to do. They break out of the base, murder everybody there, move into the surrounding community and start murdering everybody there too. Why would the government intentionally create soldiers who are uncontrollable and kill literally everyone they see, including the people who made them? I don't know. The movie doesn't really spend much time worrying about that.

Honestly, as I describe this, it sounds much more interesting than the actual movie was. It's not this interesting. It's just murdery. These guys go around murdering people while you're stuck watching this shitty mother try to protect her child from them.

The super soldiers don't even have much going on as villains. They don't talk or communicate. They have these glowing eyes and just wander around killing people. They reminded me a little of the creatures from Pitch Black or the evil Kryptonians in Superman, except those Kryptonians had charisma. These guys are just bad guys doing bad things without much personality behind any of it.

Reginald VelJohnson turns up as one of Celeste's allies, which was fun. It was nice seeing him, and this is at least a better role for him than being the guy screwing your protagonist's mother in One Night Only. Unfortunately, he's still in Onslaught.

I know there are fanboys of the director who are going to like this because of who made it, and A24 is behind it, and the trailer looks good. If you cut the right pieces together, this looks like it should be an interesting premise and an interesting movie. I promise you it's not. This is garbage. Don't waste your time or your money seeing it. The trailer may actually be the best part because you get the premise, some cool-looking images, and then you get to leave.