In Review: ‘Onslaught,’ “Mayday’

Onslaught
Dir. Adam Wingard
92 min.

In Adam Wingard’s 2014 thriller The Guest, Dan Stevens plays a mysterious veteran who, it’s later revealed, has been turned into a pitiless killing machine after participating in a secret government program designed to create super soldiers. With Onslaught, Wingard follows the same logic that led to Aliens following Alien: If one super soldier was scary, why not have more than one? Though the film, which Wingard has confirmed takes place in the same universe as The Guest, caps the number of deadly antagonists at three, the resemblance doesn’t end there. Where The Guest emphasized slow-burn suspense, Onslaught is first and foremost a relentless, gory action film that pits a handful of underprepared characters against inhuman foes with no regard for human life (complete with a tough heroine defending a little girl). The setting might be a desolate stretch of the American West, but it’s a spiritual companion to LV-426.

OK, not everyone at the Windy Oasis Trailer Park can be called underprepared. An ex-Army sniper still haunted by her time in the Middle East, Celeste (Adria Arjona) keeps a small arsenal in her trailer. As the trailer park’s manager, however, she’s a bit of a pushover, letting a high-strung highway patrolman named Kovacks (Eric Wareheim) off with a stern warning when he’s late with his rent and agreeing  to pick up cigarettes for Vietnam War vet Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) from the closest outpost to civilization, a gas station some miles away. Celeste has made Windy Oasis her home longer than she’d planned, a source of stress with an ex who wants to move somewhere else, taking their daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) with him. That’s the sort of problem that fades into the background pretty quickly when a trio of super soldiers nicknamed “The Cockroach” (Dave Campbell), The Crybaby (Tyler Hall), and The Butcher (Alex Pereira), escapees from a nearby secret lab, show up and start killing everyone.

Written by Wingard’s frequent collaborator Simon Barrett, Onslaught strikes a sometimes wobbly balance between the gritty scenes in which Celeste deals with PTSD and frets about her relationship with her child and the over-the-top pulp characters that inadvertently sic super-soldiers on her. In the latter, Dan Stevens shows up not as his character from The Guest but as Dr. Hans Kammler, the elderly, bald descendant of Nazi scientists whose agenda might not be that different from that of his ancestors. He’s introduced kissing the feet of his wife Hanna (Rebecca Hall). She’ll later work beside Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a black-ops officer who enters the film staring at a gyrating dancer’s body in a high-end sex club. (He’s sober enough to take on the assignment, he tells his superior, provided he gets some protein to offset the drugs.) 

While Onslaught’s two worlds might be a bit mismatched, they’re both compelling and Wingard stages the film’s second-half action with verve and intensity. (He also carries over The Guest’s fondness for John Carpenter by drawing inspiration from Assault on Precinct 13.) Arjona emerges as an impressive action star, but her performance also gives the film some much-needed gravity, as do a couple of nods to the real-world implications of the military taking action against civilians. But from the ’70s-style title card to the brisk running time, to the shifts in tone, to the gleeful violence it’s obvious that Wingard’s mostly interested in summoning up B-movie pleasures of decades past. He’s also largely successful. Onslaught is playing in IMAX theaters but its real home is a run-down grindhouse. —Keith Phipps

Onslaught begins its onslaught in wide release tonight.

Mayday 
Dir. Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley
111 min.

Ryan Reynolds has been a glib, unfunny screen presence for nearly three decades, a durability that suggests that many people do not find him glib and unfunny, accepting him much as they might accept, say, the default motion smoothing setting on their TV sets. It might be tempting to say that he’s “evolved” since National Lampoon’s Van Wilder defied critical consensus and made him a star in 2002, but it’s the projects themselves that have legitimized him more than any significant tweaks on his part. There’s a fundamental disengagement to his approach to comedy that tends to suck the air out of his films, one defined by an arch, wink-wink/nudge-nudge running commentary that signals to the audience never to take what they’re seeing too seriously. All of what they’re experiencing is just grist for the mill. 

It’s hard to know for certain if Mayday, a silly new Apple TV action-comedy, would have worked with another actor in the lead role, if only because it feels tailored specifically to Reynolds. But the writer-director team of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley have been on such a heater of late that they deserve the benefit of the doubt. Their two previous efforts, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Game Night, are about as good as mainstream comedies get these days, because they have the rare ability to scale up the action without slowing the pace or stepping on gags. And while the pair doesn’t seem to have devised any great thematic rationale for revisiting the end of the Cold War—other than maybe noting the Russians love their children, too, which Sting already covered—a cross-cultural buddy comedy that goofs on Top Gun isn’t a bad idea. It just can’t survive its star. 

Though he’s now too old to play a hot-shot Air Force fighter pilot, Reynolds nonetheless channels peak Tom Cruise as Troy Kelly, the sort of ultra-confident flyer who earns citations for both his audacity and his recklessness. His latest stunt draws the attention of the CIA, which recruits him for black-ops spy mission in the Soviet Union, which by 1987 had been transforming rapidly under Glasnost. When a Russian jet shoots Troy’s plane down in the middle of a snowy forest, ex-KGB officer Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh) scoops up the wounded pilot and nurses him back to health. His motives for helping Troy are unclear, but Nikolai’s love for American culture is undisputed, particularly his affinity for the hit movie Top Gun, which he rewatches constantly on a bootlegged VHS tape.

For a Maverick type to get saved from snowy oblivion by a super-fan echoes the James Caan-Kathy Bates dynamic in Misery, though Nikolai seems too happy to reach for the sledgehammer. There’s a hint of what Branagh might do with a role like this in Tenet, the Christopher Nolan film where he played a Russian Bond villain type to hammy perfection, but he adds a Santa Claus twinkle to his eye as Nikolai, whose excitement over the situation gives Mayday a lift. Goldstein and Daley have a flair for slick action sequences, too, that sends this buddy comedy barreling toward a splashy finale in Moscow. Yet all the positive energy in the world isn’t enough to rescue a comedy with so few actual laughs, because so much falls on Reynolds’ mirthless wisecracks. The film dies at his feet. — Scott Tobias

Mayday starts streaming for Apple TV subscribers tomorrow.