Upgrade” Steals From Everybody, and It’s Pretty Terrific
by Joseph Shelton
All art is theft, but what I find inspiring and maybe even refreshing about genre films is how laissez-faire they are about theft. There’s not one thing in “Upgrade”, the modestly budgeted sci-fi thriller from writer and director Leigh Whannell, that you haven’t seen or read before. It’s all there, from a cyberpunk-inspired plot point of an AI implanted into an ordinary man’s spine to its sleekly near-future skyline, and all reminiscent of Bladerunner, or, if you’re feeling more obscure, “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Virtuosity”. And its story of that ordinary man’s discovery that he can do all sorts of violent, badass stuff without thinking about it recalls the “Bourne” movies. “Upgrade” remixes all those elements, but that’s nothing new, either. Everything is made up of stuff ripped off of something else.
So what makes “Upgrade” so damn entertaining despite itself? Because it really is.
Logan Marshall-Green plays the futuristically-named Grey Trace, an old-fashioned auto-mechanic and borderline Luddite in a world that is even more networked and computer-contingent than ours, but not much more. One day a freak accident overtakes a self-driving car, sending Grey and his wife into an ambush that renders Grey a paraplegic and kills his wife. Immobilized and driven by the usual thirst for revenge, Grey eventually accepts help from a mysterious tech mogul. His mobility, it seems, can be restored by a computer chip implanted into his spine. And what’s more, the chip contains an AI that proves useful in getting all that revenge — it can even take direct control during a fight, feinting and striking with an inhuman readiness.
The fight scenes are the standout. The chip, named STEM, is in control of Grey’s body, not Grey himself, and so for many of the movie’s action scenes Marshall-Green gets to play shocked at his own actions, shouting with a disbelief that turns, gradually, into steely satisfaction as he gets used to his newfound skills. He becomes, as guys in these kinds of movies often do, a “killing machine”, but “Upgrade” keeps it fairly light despite the gore and revenge — at times it even manages to be darkly comic.
Maybe a genre movie gets by on how entertainingly it presents those things it steals from others. By this metric, “Upgrade” is a rousing success. “Citizen Kane” it ain’t, but there are those, I hear, who feel that eminent classic to be a little light on car chases and splattered viscera.
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