Upgrade
If you’ve taken so much as an hour of an introductory philosophy course, you’ve probably heard a handful of thought experiments. Let’s stick to this one for now, though: say that you have a car that’s rickety and worn out. You replace its parts one by one until none of the original pieces exist. Is it the same car or a new car afterwards? If it works, does it really matter?
In the case of Upgrade, however, the question is whether or not old-school mechanic Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) is the same man after giving himself over to technology that endows him with Terminator-like fighting techniques at the cost of total free will. The second feature from Leigh Whannell as a writer/director addresses some of these musings to modest success in the form of gutty grindhouse homage, its script’s repetition redeemed by its nuttiness.
Let me first be clear that I’m not projecting philosophical readings onto the film: the movie itself opens with Grey working on his classic Thunderbird. The bond between man and machine is the through line of Upgrade—it’s obviously the baseline of this world. It’s afterwards that we’re introduced to Grey’s wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo), and as the two return an autonomous car to a tech-genius client named Eron (Harrison Gilbertson), the vehicle malfunctions and crashes.
Grey is rendered paraplegic in a second; Asha is executed by a hoard of obscure techno-thugs. After three months of living in depression and a Professor Xavier-esque wheelchair, the technophobic widower takes up Eron on getting some sort of help. Before you know it, Grey has a microchip called STEM inside his neck, a little piece of equipment that communicates neural information to the nervous system. The chip talks to Grey internally and allows him to kick ass and take names, and now he’s ready to find out who ruined his life and why.
It’s a plethora of other ’70s and ’80s properties rolled into one candy-colored cocktail. The base liquor here is motor oil and plasma; the garnishes are chunks of gore and vertebrae. Even if it may not come off as the most original, Whannell is clearly having fun with the inherent absurdity of his concept and very little is executed in a workmanlike manner: for a film set in the future, Upgrade is a refreshingly stripped-down and small-scale jaunt. The combat is tangible, the blows are brutal, and the action is driven by people instead of pixels, all of the flying bodies and blood spurts tracked by the camera. All the while, the underrated Marshall-Green continues to act as an amiable everyman, and the sheer energy of the film assists in spicing up Whannell’s sluggish script when these facets cross paths.
But while Upgrade is mostly a grindhouse throwback done right, it also runs the risk several times of falling apart due to its inconsistent momentum and generic character motivation. The models of films such as Death Wish and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are apparent from the beginning, and yet the inspirations from the former also bring a shallowness and absent-minded male fantasy that feels dated instead of retro.
Such flaws would be understandable were they the foundations for the film’s humorous bits, but they’re treated quite seriously—it’s the inconsequential deadpan that lightens up the tone instead. Whannell also seems unsure at points as to how much attention he should pay to the film’s thematic core, and isolated scenes in the second half suffer from familiarity as a result. Nevertheless, the film knows its context as a nutty, selectively nasty romp—as an hour and a half of technophobic body horror. Certain pieces of this old motor may have some screws loose, but there’s mileage to be had, assuming the viewer can switch their brain between manual and automatic.
About the Author: Matt Cipolla
Writer and film critic for hire who has worked with Kino Lorber Studio Classics, WGN Radio, Bright Wall/Dark Room, RogerEbert.com, The Spool, and more. Firmly believes that ".gif" is pronounced "jiff." 
