Sometimes you go to the movies to see a rich compelling
story, meet lovable, well developed characters, or feel emotions you didn’t
even know you were capable of feeling. Other times you go to the movies just
because you want to see some over-the-top cool shit. Upgrade is a B-movie through and through in the best possible way:
a down and dirty, bone crunching slice of sci-fi pulp that’s smartly crafted, committed
to squeezing every ounce of potential out of its small budget and jam packed
with squicky kills and creative camera tricks. The result is a potent fusion of
Robocop and Death Wish, but with less satire than the former and more humor
than the latter.
Our story takes places in the near future where technology
has advanced to the point that drones, self-driving cars and cybernetic
implants are the norm but haven’t become entirely ubiquitous. Not everyone is
quite onboard with this hands-off high-tech lifestyle though, namely our
protagonist, Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green), who still prefers to work with
his own hands and makes a living fixing vintage cars for wealthy clients. One
night, he and his wife are attacked by a group of cybernetically enhanced
thugs. Grey’s wife is killed, and he is left paralyzed, but one of his clients
(Harrison Gilbertson) offers him a cure: an experimental AI implant called STEM
(Simon Maiden) that controls his body and gives him superhuman abilities he
previously didn’t have. With the use of his limbs back and a sophisticated
supercomputer in his brain, Grey sets off to find the men who killed his wife
and left him for dead.
That may not sound like the most original premise on paper,
and admittedly it’s not, but execution is everything, and this movie really
knows how to drop the guillotine. The central gimmick is that STEM has a bit of
a mind of his own, which makes him incredibly helpful with Grey’s detective
work, and when granted permission, can remote-control Grey’s body entirely and
turn him into a one-man beatdown machine. The fight choreography is fast-paced,
bloody and brutal, and writer/director Leigh Whannell’s background in horror
(he’s the co-creator of the Saw and Insidious series) means he knows just
when to go for the money shot. The thing that makes it especially outstanding
is its camera-work, using lockdown, rotation and Steadicam to dizzying effects
that have the same wow factor that bullet time had in The Matrix, or the POV shots in Hardcore
Henry.
The real thing that holds this movie together, though, is Logan
Marshall-Green. He may look like a poor man’s Tom Hardy and only has a few minor
roles to his name (you may recognize him as one of Vulture’s thugs in Spiderman:
Homecoming), but he does a lot with a character in such a
bizarre situation. The movie, when you get right down to it, is a buddy-cop
flick where the two cops share a body, so Green does wonders talking back to a
partner only he can hear, and he makes getting your body hijacked look as
bizarre and uncomfortable as it must feel. Simon Maiden also makes a perfect
straight man, even if he’s only present in voice-over, and the two work
incredibly well off each other. Grey is still a Luddite, even though he
volunteered to have STEM grafted into him, and his penchant for “old-fashioned”
tech comes in handy, especially when his investigation leads him to a bar where
cybernetics are prohibited. Plus, Grey is still technically paralyzed as far as
the rest of the world is concerned, so he and STEM have to figure out how to
conduct their investigation while still convincing the police, STEM’s creator
and the omnipresent surveillance drones that he’s still bound to a wheelchair.
And that’s the overall tone that dictates the plot. STEM and
Grey have to figure out how to carry on their investigation/killing spree
without letting anyone on, payed off with scenes of precision kills and car
chases at regular intervals, sprinkled in with some oldschool cyberpunk body
horror. The overarching themes of overreliance on automation, surveillance and
AI seems a bit like an episode of Black
Mirror that was rejected for being too on the nose, with the narrative
leaning more on the “old tech good” side of things. I wish the ending wasn’t on
the predictable side, but once you figure out that there had to be more to the
inciting incident than just a plain old robbery, it’s pretty easy to piece
things together and figure out what’s really going on and who’s been in control
of things the whole time.
Bottom line, Upgrade
is a nasty good time for those looking for those looking for something more
lean, visceral and economical between all the CG and superheroes clogging up
the summer schedule. It serves doubly as a calling card for Leigh Whannell to
show he’s more than just the Saw guy and to show what he can do with just $5
million dollars, and as another title for Blumhouse to put in the “from the
producers of” section of their movie posters between Get
Out and The Purge. Definitely
check this out if you’re already tapped out on Deadpool
2 and Infinity
War.
7/10
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