Upgrade: Movie Review

Fuck you, I'm not watching Solo.

I'm not watching Solo cause it's the most unnecessary (so far) of Disney's Star Wars films. So instead I watched the sci fi thriller Upgrade. Now I'm even more mad at Solo, because with it being such a big draw (plus Infinity War and Deadpool 2 still being in theaters) absolutely no one is going to watch Upgrade except for ultra cynical douches like me, and that's just tragic.

So from the trailer and basic premise you might be pretty underwhelmed by Upgrade. A motorhead who likes working with his hands on restoring old cars in the future where hands off technology has made him more and more obsolete gets into an accident with his wife after their self driving car malfunctions and leaves them stranded in a shitty part of town. Next thing you know, a gang of thugs shows up, kills his wife, and leaves him a quadriplegic. Not much left to do but attach a super smart A.I. To your brain called STEM (oh nooow I get it) and go after the men who killed your wife, I suppose.

It all sounds pretty brainless, but surprisingly it all works exceptionally well. With the tools he's been given, Leigh Whannell has delivered a very smart, brutal, if kinda routine, sci fi thriller. Basically what Upgrade is good at is setting, fight scenes, and world building. What it's bad at is... everything else.

Story wise, the plot moves at a pretty brisk pace. Our main character, Grey Trace, gets outfitted with the A.I. STEM, who gives him what amounts to super human expansion of his senses and muscles and guides Grey through his journey, pointing out clues and what not. There's breathing room here and there as Grey finds his next target while lying to a detective working on his case about still being confined to a wheelchair. It's pretty standard stuff as the movie goes from location to location, person's house to seedy bar to apartment complex, gathering clues and picking off bad guys until the true villain behind it all is revealed and we have our final showdown. What keeps this from being pure schlock is the execution of it all. As we follow Grey, little bits of info about his world start to open up. There's a whole subset of people with bionic implants who think they're above normal people ('upgraded' they call themselves), police work now takes the form of analyzing drone footage, synthetic limbs are now more accessible than ever, and underground hackers fight against the aforementioned 'upgraded'. One of my favorite aspects of this film is the theme of technology overwhelming humans. When Grey has STEM installed, his arms and legs return to him, but with the stiffness in movement you'd see in a video game, where the limbs are being feed through the cold 1's and 0's of a machine's brain. A problem that persists as Grey occasionally lets STEM have full control.

Where all that stuff falls apart is the fact that the movie doesn't really want to get deeper into these concepts other than “oh yeah they exist”. The hacker I mentioned earlier shows up for one scene, says the phrase “I have to fight THEM (referring to the 'upgraded')” then leaves, never to show up or be mentioned again. Plot holes mount up fast as STEM's ability to control Grey as well as his awareness of the situation are called into question. Characters know information at ultra convenient times, characters don't look at the information in front of them and come to very obvious conclusions, and characters simply don't know things that the audience knew 20 minutes ago. “Wow Eric, this movie is really starting to sound like a cluster fuck” I hear you say, and yes, it is kind of a mess, but the thing is... it all kinda works. Not a single moment is too dumb or distracting to make the movie an incomprehensible mess, and the movie takes itself just seriously enough to brush off some of the more harsher plot holes with a smile and a “don't worry about it”.

Like I said before, execution counts for a lot. As a whole, the plot may be messy, but moment to moment performances and fight scenes are good enough to overlook a lot of it. The fight scenes are brutal as hell, as when Grey lets STEM have full control, he's able to pull of some pretty ridiculous fight choreography. Coupled with some unnerving camera angles and Grey's stiff robotic movements create this wonderful disconnect where the person onscreen becomes much less human to achieve his very human goal. Sprinkle on some nice body horror and gore and you basically have a B-Movie version of a Black Mirror episode.

Upgrade is far from a perfect movie, but it's most definitely an entertaining one. I feel with tweaks to the script (or maybe an extended edition when it hits home video) it could have stood next to Robocop as one of the great dark sci fi satire films, but as it stands, its a fun high budget B-Movie. 

7/10