Review: Upgrade

For the past few years Logan Marshall-Green has become most famous for being ‘Discount Tom Hardy’ due to the surprising similar appearance of the two actors. It’s funny then that in 2018, both Green and Hardy had films that involved them getting possessed by outside elements that make them harder, better, faster, stronger. And yet it’s Green with the low-budget, R-Rated, original I.P. Upgrade that proved to be the best of the two, and rightly so because it’s been a good while since the revenge genre has had a breath of fresh air like this and it bloody well works.

Set in the not-too-distant future, the film follows stay-at-home mechanic Grey Trace and his wife Asha who works for a cybernetic firm dealing with military vets and amputees. After delivering a refurbished car to the home of reclusive billionair inventor Eron Keen, Grey and Asha take a self-driving car home only for a malfunction to crash their car, whereupon a group of muggers kill Asha and shoot Grey in the neck.

Three months later and Grey is living paralysed below the neck, while his home has been outfitted to provide for him the loss of his wife and his motor functions has rendered him suicidal. That is until Eron arrives offering Grey an experimental and highly secretive procedure to implant him with a computer chip called STEM that would allow him to live a normal life again. Grey agrees and sure enough STEM proves to be a miracle cure, but to Grey’s surprise, STEM is a far more advanced A.I. than he was led to believe with a voice and thought process of his own. Whilst initially scared, STEM helps provide some vital clues towards finding the men who killed Asha, but while Grey is not prepared for the level of violence needed to make headway in the criminal underbelly, he soon finds out that STEM has no problem reaching that level and exceeding it.

If you break the film down to a cyberpunk revenge thriller than you still have a great little story on you, with Grey’s investigation taking him to see some colourful characters and disturbing realities of a world so advanced to ours but featuring a lot of the same problems. Surrounding that though you have a cautionary tale of when science goes too far, the battle between the perfection of computers against the improvisation of humans and a great one-man partnership between Grey and STEM whose constant back-and-forth provide the film with a great backbone to build the rest of the story around.

I almost knocked the film down because immediately I could see where the ending was going but then they pulled the rug out from under me and gave me a much more impressive twist and an even better end note that genuinely shocked me.

Acting was the only area that I feel the film really suffers from and even then it’s not that bad. I feel like there should’ve been more scenes with Eron, the little we see give us enough to show he’s an introverted genius with people problems but there’s a little level of self-doubt that get just a hint of before he disappears until the final act and I feel like they could’ve built on that a little more. Primary villain for most of the film was a man called Fisk, an ex-soldier who went through a similar process to Grey’s and ended up with a biometric gun inside of his arm, while fairly generic on the outside, Fisk was coolheaded and creepy enough to make an impact and his sense of betterment due to his augmentations gave him enough of a sinister edge that he was a decent villain overall.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Detective Cortez, I understood her position in the film being a link between Grey and law-enforcement but she didn’t feel like her own character. There was little things like her preferring to be hands-on as opposed to using a drone but she honestly just felt like she was geared more towards spouting exposition, and not even good exposition since she was telling Grey stuff he already knew. She almost comes into her own once she starts really looking into Grey but by then it’s too little too late and she suffers as a result.

Thankfully Grey serves well as the film’s main character with Logan Marshall-Green delivering a surprisingly funny performance, what sets Grey apart from your typical action heroes is that he’s really not one. He knows engines and he’s a loving husband but when it comes to violent actions, he’s not the best, not so much a pacifist but he’s not a super-soldier with years or training and he lives a life of luxury with Asha’s very high-paying job so he doesn’t have any hardened past that would need him to be good at fighting. The humour comes later with Grey’s initial feelings after the attack being closer to suicide, which makes a refreshing change to the hero being dead-set on revenge, mostly because he has no means of revenge until STEM comes into his life.

Part of what makes Green’s performance work so well is his confused and terrified reactions to what his body is doing to other people without him in control, it’s slightly horrifying and also kinda hilarious whenever Grey is beating, slicing or shooting someone and he’s pleading with himself to stop. There’s also a small element of corruption that drives Grey in ways outside of his partnership with STEM, as soon as STEM is implanted Grey starts walking a little more robotically, a little stiffer, more unnatural in his movements which is the most obvious change but also from a psychological standpoint, while he never gets use to the utter depravity of STEM you do get the sense that he becomes more open to the idea of doing bad or perhaps better, how to get out of it. Grey’s a good talker and uses that to his advantage when STEM can’t think of a solution, be it using his wheelchair to illicit pity or taunting someone to lose their cool, all fine tactics of self-preservation but the closer Grey gets to the truth the more you think that the little voice of STEM in his ear is pushing him in the wrong direction.

STEM himself is an interesting sort because you’re never quite sure what he’s capable of, is his knowledge of violence simply from being able to calculate the best result as quickly as possible or is there something more sinister in his actions. There are moments of both sides that make it difficult to tell, moments when he’ll take full control of Grey’s body without permission but then state his case about the best course of action for them both and even thanks Grey for some of his more illogical choices. Naturally you suspect an A.I. to be evil but STEM gives just enough that you’re never quite sure what his next move will be.

The film is directed by Leigh Whannel, best known for his partnership with James Wan where they created the Saw and Insidious franchises together. This being Whannel’s second film as director and first without involvement from Wan, he easily proves himself to have a talent for R-Rated nastiness and pitch-black humour, I covered it earlier but Grey’s reactions to what STEM does lighten the tone enough without losing the dark themes of the film (watch what happens when he turns someone’s gun on themselves). They didn’t go all-out with the gore work, in fact I’d argue they had themselves back so as not to go too far, but there’s still plenty of nice blood-spilling including the aforementioned gun-turn, a near-decapitation and a grisly piece of facial torture involving a knife.

If I have to criticize something I will say I wasn’t a huge fan of the action scenes, there’s only about three of them but they’re all one-on-one fights, different enough that they’re all different, the first showing off STEM’s power, the second starts with a chase scene that leads to a quick and ending and the last (and best) has Grey facing off against Fisk and both men being equal in their abilities meaning STEM can’t anticipate a winning move. Nothing is inherently wrong with them, they’re fairly standard so it’s good thing this isn’t an action movie, it’s pretty much body-horror with a tinge of satire, it’s never stated how far into the future the film is set but the technology involved is recognisably advanced, touch-screens in the furniture, body-augmentations, self-driving cars, all stuff that is very much real but just tweaked or pushed a little further, there’s even a drug den when people use VR headsets to escape their reality rather than using drugs to do the same. There’s a sense of warning towards how reliant we’re becoming on technology, not so much that it detracts from the main revenge storyline but seeing how prominent it is throughout the film and the several ways it can backfire you have to believe that Whannel put some undertones in there by choice, in fact if the ending of the film is anything to go by I’d say he was building up to that turn to play into the darker tones of the film.

Upgrade is the type of film they don’t make anymore, it’s schlocky enough to be entertaining but sophisticated enough to be a genuinely good film, the type of flick you’d imagine David Cronenberg making in the 80s. It’s story is two-parts revenge to one part buddy comedy and manages to push you in one direction before pulling you away from where you thought it was going. While the supporting cast left something to be desired the partnership of Grey and STEM gave the film a great double-act with Green delivering a brilliant horrified everyman performance as his body slowly become not his anymore and Whannel’s direction gave us all the bloodshed, cybernetic satire and dark-as-sin humour we could want. I had a ton of fun with this flick and glad it’s found its place as the better body-horror movie of 2018.

8/10