Movie Reaction: Upgrade

Formula: Harcore Henry + Ex Machina

Upgrade feels like the best in show at a genre movie festival. Not coincidentally, it did win the audience award at this year's South by Southwest festival. It's a movie with a few moments of brilliance and a lot of mediocre in between. It's a grindhouse movie: like a very good B-movie that doesn't shy away from violence. It's tough to rate these movies because, going in, they admit their faults. If they were an athlete, they'd be specialists, not decathletes. The idea is that the movie does a couple things so well (hyper-violence, cool set design, impressive choreography) that it makes up for all sorts of other deficiencies (writing, acting). I'm not a huge fan of this kind of movie, but I do like to see one on occasion because you never know what will click.

Upgrade is set in a not-too-distant future. It's a world of self-driving cars and it has that thing that all futuristic films have now where every flat surface is a computer screen*. Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) works on classic cars sometimes for pay but mostly as a hobby. His beautiful wife, Asha (Melanie Vallejo) makes the real money as some sort of tech businesswoman. Grey isn't about all this advanced technology stuff. He'd rather work with his hands. Well, one day, Grey brings Asha along to deliver a car he just remodeled to a client. The client is Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson). You know Eron. He's one of those wunderkind tech billionaires with no social skills. Eron tells them about some advanced technology he's working on. On the way home, Grey and Asha get attacked by some goons who leave Grey a quadriplegic and kill Asha. Eron visits a grief-stricken Grey and offers to give him a super off-the-books operation that implants an advanced operating system into his body. This OS is called STEM. It gives Grey the use of his limbs again, talks to Grey in his head, and with Grey's permission, can take over Grey's motor functions and make him a super effective killing machine. Of course, Grey immediately uses this as a way to start getting revenge on the men who killed his wife, which puts him in the cross hairs of the detective, Cortez (Betty Gabriel), who is investigating his wife's murder. Oh, and there's a third act twist. It's one of those twists you'll guess early then dismiss because it's too obvious.

*Quick side rant: Everyone knows exactly how these random computer screens work in these movies. I can't go to a hotel and figure out how the shower nozzle works, but in 25 years, we all magically understand every proprietary operating system. Sure, OK.

Honestly, this is the sort of movie that I should be able to spoil every single story beat and it wouldn't hurt your enjoyment of it. That's because this is being sold as a hard action movie with some dark comedy. The best parts of the movie are when STEM takes over Grey's body. Seeing Grey's nervous face at odds with his mercilessly efficient body inflicting pain on others is perversely delightful. The violence was a little too severe for my taste - I'm more about kicks and punches than bones snapping and decapitations - but those scenes are really well done. Logan Marshall-Green gets the unnatural physicality right and is mostly convincing looking overwhelmed and uncomfortable on his face. It's just a shame there weren't more of these scenes.

This movie has to lay a lot of narrative pipe to get to the good parts. Writer/director Leigh Whannell gets way too bogged down with the story. I didn't check the run time, but it had to be 30 minutes at least before the first STEM-powered fight. There's only 3 or 4 of them and they are all pretty brief. Whannell seems distracted by showing off all the other future technology. I would've much rather seen the version of this movie that put less money into futuristic cars and more into well choreographed fight scenes. And, the way the story plays out is very Technology Dystopia 101. It didn't feel original at all. I'm also not sure how much sense it made either, but that's beside the point. This felt a lot like a tryout movie*.

*i.e. a movie a filmmaker makes to prove that he/she can handle something with a larger budget.

Upgrade was none of the things I hoped it would be. It wasn't a funny buddy movie between a man and the voice inside his head. It wasn't much of a non-stop action movie. There wasn't enough of a sense of fun, which anything with such a wacky premise really needs. It was a pretty standard futuristic movie that didn't really have anything new to say. It feels like a really great short film that kept getting more plot added to fill out the 90 minutes, like adding more slices of bread to a sandwich without adding more meat to it.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend