Review of Upgrade (2018) by Allan C — 24 Jun 2018

Logan Marshall-Green is Grey Trace, an analogue dude living in a near-future digital world, who makes his living fixing up old muscle cars. That is until he and his wife's smart car goes haywire, crashes, are they are robbed and left for dead.

However, Grey was not killed and is instead left a quadriplegic. That is until one of his muscle car clients, an Elon Musk-like scientist/billionaire, offers to give him his life back with a chip implant that would put an artificial intelligence named Stem into his nervous system, which can make him mobile again and also allow him a chance to get revenge! Stem can also, with Gray's permission, take over his body to make him a deadly fighting machine (basically becoming Neo from "The Matrix"), which makes for a number of entertaining action sequences.

So what's the tone of this film? Try to imagine if David Cronenberg had developed "The Six Million Dollar Man." (i.e. a near perfect marriage of smart body-horror and pulp sci-fi). Stem talk to grey in his head, where no one else can hear Stem, which is entertaining and reminded me of Don Johnson in "A Boy and His Dog" where Johnson's Vic and his telepathic dog Blood would talk to one another, where Grey and Vic are the the brawn and Stem and Blood are the brains of the duos.

In terms of theme, "Upgrade" is clearly a cautionary tale of how we are allowing technology to integrate itself into our lives, in this case in the most extreme of ways. Grey talking to Stem, seeking help and advice, is not all that different from talking to Siri or Alexa and for assistance.

The revenge film elements of the plot, with Grey working his way up the food chain of criminals to find out who's behind his wife's death, are pretty standard "Death Wish" stuff (including a pretty obvious twist ending), though the technology themed body horror elements of the story made that routine plot far more interesting.

"The Crow" is probably a good comparison, which was also a revenge film at its core, but added supernatural and goth elements to jazz up the familiar plot device. "Upgrade" was written and directed by Leigh Whannell, who wrote "Saw" and "The Conjuring," so this film certainly delivers gore and suspense.

The gory elements were shockingly fun to watch on the big screen, but later thinking about the movie, the excessive gore and violence really didn't add anything to the film outside of one scene where Grey can't bring himself to torture information out of his attackers and turns his body over to Stem to do it for him.

The film's violence is really just gratuitous for it's own sake, which is not that different from most horror films, but this film seems smarter than that. My other knock on the film is that it never really delves too deeply into it's themes around the dangers of integrating technology into our lives and body modification.

Whannell also throws in a few other completely underdeveloped cautionary ideas around virtual reality and other techno babble, which go nowhere. So overall, don't go into this film thinking it's anywhere as smart a typical episode of "Black Mirror.

" This film is pure pulp, but it's a wickedly fun pulp and left me wanting to see what writer/director Whannell will do next. "Upgrade" was produced by Blumhouse, who has again continued their streak of delivering smart above-average genre pictures ("Get Out," "Insidious," "The Purge," "The Belko Experiment," etc.

), making this another must-see film for sci-fi/horror fans.