Upgrade Review

Upgrade is a film I simultaneously expected and yet didn't see coming from the writer/director of the Saw franchise. It has the upper-tier grindhouse acting and production design I've come to expect from Blumhouse Productions and has the brutality and gore I would've expected from Leigh Whannell, but at the same time it's much darker than I expected from a summer action movie and actually has one or two really good ideas in its head instead being a mindless popcorn flick. It's just a shame that those good ideas are introduced in the last two minutes of the film.



Some time in the near future (far enough for us to have cars that drive themselves and cyborg implants but not far enough that everything doesn't look exactly like an early 21st century city), working class joe Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) and his wife are involved in a car accident/mugging. After his wife is killed and he is paralyzed, Grey is approached by a reclusive billionaire who offers him a microbot implant that will allow him to walk again. He accepts, but soon discovers that the STEM, the robot, has a mind of its own and can even take control of Grey's body if he gives it permission. With STEM essentially making him a Terminator, Grey goes on a revenge killing-spree to revenge himself on the men who murdered his wife. Along the way, he discovers a conspiracy which isn't that hard to figure out until the film tosses you a copout curve-ball near the end and grows a stronger attachment with STEM, blurring the line between his mind and the machine's.



One of the most surprising things about the film is the way the main character is written. Normally, in brutal summer grindhouse action-films (and in action films in general) our main hero is already a badass stoic who received some kind of off-screen special forces training so the audience doesn't question who he's able to kill so many people so efficiently and not show the least bit of remorse or moral confusion over it. However, in this film Grey really does feel like a vulnerable everyman pushed to his emotional limit. He even has a few scenes where he breaks down crying, which I appreciated. His behavior makes him so much more identifiable when considering the condition he's in; if he had gone through losing his wife and getting paralyzed it would've been weird if he'd taken it all with a Liam Neeson-esq stoicism rather than breaking down. They also made it easy to understand why he lets STEM into his head in the first place; at first, he's scared and violated by the robot's voice in his head, but eventually brings him back out of loneliness. Through just a few well-chosen shots of his now isolated house the audience is made to feel the loneliness he's going through and therefore better understand his willingness to bring back the robot's voice; he just wants somebody to talk to.



Another aspect I found surprising is that it's a lot more restrained in its portrayal of violence than I imagined it would be. Sure, it has its gory moments and even moments of tragic intensity, but I expected something a lot more shocking from the creator of Saw. None of the punches in the servicable but unspectacular fight scenes feel like they pack any kind of wallop and there's not a lot of creative choreography or use of the environment which you'd think would be expected from a guy who created so many amazingly horrifying and creative traps in his most well-known work.



The acting is just kind of ok; Marshall-Green has to carry a lot of emotional weight and sell that he's being controlled by a tiny robot and he does that pretty well. The most entertaining performance is probably Simon Maiden as STEM, delivering on the difficult task of sounding just human enough to believe he's alive while also sounding just enough like a robot that we don't forget what he is.



The one or two really good ideas the film explores (to varying degrees) are themes that I wouldn't have expected from a dirty grindhouse film. The first is commentary about man's reliance on technology; Grey already lives in a world where automated machines do almost everything for human beings and taking this idea to its logical extreme Grey is continuously forced to rely upon STEM to drive his body. This theme is eventually carried to a really dark place that plays out like a Black Mirror episode, albeit somewhat dumbed down.



The second theme in the film is one I find far more interesting, but doesn't get a lot of screen time; living in fantasy vs living in reality. At about the midway point of the film Grey and STEM visit a hacker who can keep STEM from being shut down. In this hacker's layer there are a group of people in VR helmets and the hacker remarks that they live there, spending weeks at a time existing in VR rather than live in their poverty-stricken lives of hardship in the real world. And I'm not going to spoil anything but in the last minute of the movie something very similar happens to Grey and the question is raised again: is it better to live in the real world and be depressed or be enslaved to a happy fantasy? I left the theater pondering to myself why this wasn't made the entire over-arching theme of the story. Why introduce a big introspective question if you're barely going to spend any time on it? Now, I don't require every movie to have some deep philosophical theme to it; John Wick and Wayne's World are two of my favorite movies of all time and they're about as deep as a Kardashian. However, when you introduce such an interesting question that could've had an entire movie devoted to exploring it why would you then abandon it?



While I can't say that Upgrade is any kind of classic in the making I certainly won't be forgetting it soon. It's a competently made B-movie with a few good standout moments and one or two interesting ideas that make it worth a watch. Just don't go into it expecting much.