Upgrade a gritty futuristic B-movie

Logan Marshall-Green in Upgrade. Image courtesy BH TILT.

Upgrade is defined by its inherent identity crisis. It’s a futuristic movie, complete with robot limbs and guns for hands, but the science fiction is a delivery sySTEM for some retro B-movie carnage. It’s a nasty little movie, complete with the flaws inherent to the genre and a rather frustrating plot point a movie like this really shouldn’t require. There’s nothing great or grand about Upgrade, but the movie delivers what it promises with grit and tenacity, unburdened by expectations to do anything more than that.

The movie’s plot is both pretty basic and really bonkers. It’s the typical revenge movie, in which an average guy Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) is the victim of a violent attack that leaves his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) dead and himself paralyzed. Unable to defend his life or seek revenge, Grey gets salvation thanks to an anti-social scientist (Harrison Gilbertson) who implants Grey with a chip that allows him to regain movement. It’s only after the surgery that Grey disobers the chip, called STEM, can speak to him as well. STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden) is worth keeping around, as he can deliver the revenge Grey seeks while helping him evade the watchful eye of Detective Cortez (Betty Gabriel). STEM’s ability to speak to and control Grey are either an added benefit or a very strong reason to worry.

Upgrade treats an artificial intelligence-driven future as an inevitability, although it doesn't have a unique or particularly interesting take about a potential future overtaken by AI. The fear of technology taking over, of humans ceding control to the more convenient alternative is a ragged trope. Upgrade doesn't add much to those concerns, showing a world a few steps beyond the current iteration – smart home technology is more advanced, the self-driving cars sort of work – but is spiraling closer and closer to being controlled by machines. Technology in the movie is depicted as being either a nuisance or a menace, the possible good outweighed by a litany of cons. The newest tech is bad and scary, a device that both causes the destruction of humanity and the rise of a new social order. Upgrade would be a much deeper film if it had something to say about a world on the precipice of losing itself to machines, but writer/director Leigh Whannell uses his tech-driven milieu in a way that is sort of fascinating. Technology, in Whannell's hands, is a tool of brilliant violence, a method of finding new ways to shock the audience with gore and imaginative kills. Whether it's the machine driven man or the men integrated with machines, Upgrade is interested in finding unique ways to kill its characters in cringeworthy ways. A good to great B-movie is defined by how much gratuitous violence it can toss into a tight run time. Even though the movie isn't overly innovative with its kills, the presentation is fresh and gritty, the right kind of mix to keep a B-movie audience engaged.

What Upgrade should be called out for is the use of a death of a significant other to drive the protagonist to action. The issue is a combination of screenwriting laziness – paralyzing Grey is more motivation enough for a revenge flick – and having yet another movie kill a character to advance the story arc of another character is just bad character development. That the significant other is a woman is both unsurprising – it's difficult to count the number of movies in which this scenario is the other way around – and unproductive from a societal aspect. The benefits of doing so are outweighed by the audience frustration of watching yet another movie about white men avenging their wives’ deaths.

Adding to the frustration is the movie didn’t really need to do that at all, as Whannell's script is solid enough it actually detracts from what he’s trying to do. The progression of the relationship between Grey and STEM makes narrative sense and is handled well. The general flow of the film is easy, and credit goes to Whannell for keeping things within a friendly, 95-minute run time. Then there's the twist, and then the twist within the twist, and then the twist within the twist within the twist, and then the twist within the twist within the twist within the twist. It's about as complicated as it sounds, but all of the moving parts work in sync because Whannell provides a decent blend of foreshadowing and red herrings to keep the audience guessing a little bit. And the ultimate twist is really, really dark, aligning with Upgrade's themes, tone, and narrative. It's not a perfect ending, but it is the right one for an old-school B-movie oozing pessimism and hopelessness.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 95 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away
Target audience: B-movie fans.

Take the whole family?: The R rating is well deserved.

Theater or Netflix?: It wouldn’t be the end of the world to wait for a streaming rental.

Watch this as well?: Upgrade borrows a lot from other sources, Frankenstein among them, but for body horror it's hard to go wrong with David Cronenberg's classic Videodrome.