Upgrade (2018)

A near future. The somewhat improbably named Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) seems to be something like the next to last car mechanic on a planet full of autonomous cars and people with light cybernetic enhancements. Despite him being a bit of a luddite, he’s married to tech company suit Asha (Melanie Vallejo), and they seem to be very happy indeed. Happy, that is, until Asha’s self-driving car has a curious malfunction – though not so curious anybody in the film will ever think it strange until it’s plot twist time – and first drives them into and then crashes them in the worst part of their city.

As luck (cough) will have it, there’s a group of heavily cybered up thugs on the spot to greet them, murdering Asha and severing Grey’s spine. Grey ends up quadriplegic and suicidal, but one of his clients happens to be a genius tech mogul and offers to fix Grey’s little problem with his newest invention, a microchip implant called STEM that can basically do anything. It’s all quite hush hush and illegal of course.

Anyway, the thing does indeed give Grey control over his body back, something that becomes rather useful when he decides he’s dissatisfied with the investigating cop Cortez’s (Betty Gabriel) handling of his wife’s case and involves himself in the investigation. Turns out STEM has quite a bit of superpowers, like speaking to Grey in his head (in the voice of Simon Maiden), doing movie-magical photo enhancement, and showing itself really useful when it comes to taking over for bloodily dispatching wife killers while doing a variation of Keanu Reeves’s stiff back fu.

Given that, as a writer, he’s heavily involved in two of my most loathed franchises in the horror genre, the Insidious movies and the Saw films, I’m really not a fan of the work of Upgrade’s  Australian writer/director Leigh Whannell. However, despite sharing a couple of the flaws of these franchises, the film at hand is a much more enjoyable proposition, at least for as long as it is an unapologetic love letter to old-style exploitation films and particularly ozploitation flicks, with an added dose of cyberpunk. Which basically means until the last minute big plot twist comes around, for it, alas, is utter, unmitigated shite, leaving most of the actions the film’s villains have taken throughout the film inexplicable and more than a little absurd. In fact, given the plot twist, there’s no reason at all for anything in the film to have happened as it did. Up to that point, the film does a fine and highly entertaining job in carting out all kinds of exploitation film clichés, while giving them a new coat of paint that’ll signal “RELEVANCE TO OUR TIME!” to any mainstream critic or viewer who may stumble onto it, without ever actually saying anything insightful or relevant. This last bit is not really a complaint, but me admiring Whannell’s chutzpa.


Now, as a director, Whannell certainly is no George Miller, probably not even a Brian Trenchard-Smith, but he has a very good eye for a very 80s exploitation and cyberpunk mix of neon glowing high tech and gritty, grubby, urban street life, and a bit of gore. He’s using little of the bad music video editing and wobbly camerawork you might expect but provides Upgrade with clear lines and a stream-lined flow that isn’t even disturbed by the fact that many of Whannell’s best side-ideas are slightly bonkers and a little bit absurd. Being able to play a villain who has a weaponized sneeze among his super powers straight is quite something. This sort of thing certainly provides the fast, fun and violent revenge flick this mostly is with many entertaining distractions, distractions Whannell doesn’t let overwhelm the rest of the film but clearly enjoys including, and which keep the film from feeling too slick and factory-made. The whole affair has a lot of personality, and, as you know, personality goes a long way with me, even if you end your movie on quite as bad a note as this one ends on.