You’re Next and The Guest are two of the best genre movies of the 2010s. Both movies were directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett, and while the effectiveness of those back-to-back home runs is undeniable, follow-up projects like Blair Witch and Wingard’s Death Note didn’t quite reach the same highs. Then, understandably, Hollywood came calling and Wingard directed two Godzilla vs. Kong movies, and while horror fans were thrilled that one of their own got such a huge opportunity, it meant taking time away from genre movies. After nearly a decade away, Wingard and Barrett have reunited for Onslaught, and it comes as a major relief that they clearly haven’t missed a step in their highly stylized and entirely audacious action thriller.

Former Army sniper Celeste (Adria Arjona) lives in and oversees a trailer park, though she’s unexpectedly tasked with watching over her daughter for the weekend. Making the timing of this surprise all the more challenging is that this weekend also saw a trio of experimental super soldiers breaking out of a nearby government facility. These killers were enhanced to ignore injury and pain, and once they start murdering, they won’t stop until there’s nothing left alive in their path. When these experiments cross paths with Celeste, it’s bad news for everyone.

Wingard has publicly confirmed that, while not an outright sequel to The Guest, it’s still a movie that takes place in that world. (Essentially, the program that heightened David’s abilities in The Guest is considered an earlier version of the experiments in Onslaught.) Tonally, Onslaught fully falls in line with The Guest, always knowing exactly when to lean into the inherent absurdity of the situation for laughs while not being sarcastic or a parody of the action genre. While there are plenty of tonal similarities, it’s worth noting that the overall narrative of The Guest is much more engaging, as the audience and the characters in the movie learn about David’s intentions at the same time. Onslaught, however, explores the super soldier program early on, igniting a figurative and literal countdown to chaos. In this sense, the story drags early on before the real excitement launches.

Wingard and Barrett have a real knack for casting, riding that line between enlisting familiar faces and hiring the best person for a role. Arjona is regularly a blast to watch, as confirmed by Star Wars: Andor and Hit Man, though she might not have been anyone’s obvious choice for a movie like this. She holds her own as both a believable action star and as the heart of the movie, courtesy of the connection she has to her on-screen daughter. Eric Wareheim and Reginald VelJohnson play other residents of the trailer park, peppering the movie with quirky characters. Dan Stevens is unrecognizable as Dr. Hans Kammler, a former (?) Nazi part of Operation Paperclip who is responsible for creating the super soldiers, while Rebecca Hall played his partner and the dom to his sub. The real standout, though, was Drew Starkey’s Cyrus, who is introduced as someone capabale of cleaning up the mess of the super soldiers, though being picked up from the middle of a sex club on massive amounts of drugs means he plays a weird little freak as opposed to some highly trained operative.

If The Guest was Wingard’s The Terminator meets Halloween, then Onslaught is his The Terminator meets Assault on Precinct 13, with a little Friday the 13th thrown in for good measure. The music, courtesy of Matt Pusti, doesn’t feel like an homage to John Carpenter so much as it feels like he’s trying to outright replicate iconic themes. Such direct inspiration from Carpenter movies might rub some audiences the wrong way and feel more like the filmmakers are ripping off the acclaimed director, though Wingard has enough visual flourishes to set himself apart. The weirdness of a character like Cyrus and the visual look of the super soldiers, mixed with chainsaws and a pulsating synth score, actually makes it feel like Wingard channeled Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy director Panos Cosmatos as much as he channeled Carpenter.

All this to say, there isn’t much about Onslaught that particularly surprises you, yet that’s not inherently a bad thing. There isn’t much about the movie that feels especially original, as it borrows from great genre filmmakers of the past and the present, to make an entirely outlandish idea feel authentic. We’ve seen countless movies where contemporary filmmakers use the pastiche of the ‘70s and ‘80s to avoid having to inject their own creativity into a project, while Wingard is clearly having a blast doing what he’s doing and not trying to do anything other than bring all of his influences to life in a bombastic outing. The action in the film itself, though, is punctuated with crowd-pleasing moments, likely a credit to what he learned on his big-budget Kong movies, though none of the combat choreography is as elegant as anything seen in a John Wick movie or in acclaimed martial arts films. The violence is much more efficient than any The Raid derivative, which is refreshing that it’s so straightforward, yet also a bit underwhelming compared to the elegance of contemporary action movies.

Even if Onslaught doesn’t offer too many surprises, it’s still a blast and entirely effective at what it’s trying to accomplish, made all the easier by the fact that it has a 92-minute runtime. It’s obvious that every single person involved in the movie “knew the assignment,” as the kids say, and delivered everything necessary to make a propulsive and explosive outing. Wingard and Barrett remain a powerhouse duo in the genre space, and while the paychecks from pitting massive monsters against one another might be larger, hopefully this is only the first of the duo’s returns to genre collaborations.

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