Science fiction tale of revenge no ‘Upgrade’ over predecessors
The title of “Upgrade” refers to enhancements to the main character, not to any attempt to boost the value of the movie itself. If this vaguely cyberpunk, occasionally comic Australian flick were named after its own qualities, it would have been called “Knockoff.”
That said, the movie is a reasonably entertaining retread. Although writer-director Leigh Whannell’s themes are as predictable as his premise, the action scenes are efficient and effective. There are lots of machines in “Upgrade,” and the movie itself is a sleek apparatus. Indeed, its gizmos generally fare better than the human bodies, which are often pulped to a bloody ooze.
Perhaps that’s to be expected, since Whannell is one of the architects of the gory “Saw” horror franchise.
The story mixes and matches bits of many dystopian sci-fi movies but is most essentially “RoboCop.” Logan Marshall-Green plays Grey Trace, a man whose name flags his negligibility.
It’s not that Grey lacks skills; it’s just that they’re mostly obsolete in the near-future world he inhabits. In an age of self-driving vehicles, Grey makes his living by restoring antique muscle cars for rich collectors such as entrepreneur Eron King (Harrison Gilbertson), an eerily blond mash-up of Steve Jobs and a “Speed Racer” villain.
It just so happens that Grey’s wife, Asha (Melanie Vallejo), who’s as corporate as her husband is retro, works for Eron. When the couple pays a visit to the tech mogul, he extols the virtues of something called Stem, an implantable device he describes as “a new, better brain.”
On the way back, hackers take control of Asha’s automatic car and send it to an ambush. She is killed, and Grey is crippled by technologically modified attackers who have guns grafted onto their arms. (Is there any actual advantage to this? Nah, it just looks slick.)
Eron visits the hospital with an inevitable proposition: Grey can be remade with a Stem device seeded inside him. He won’t merely be able to move again. He’ll have superhuman strength and abilities to pursue his revenge.
Also, because Stem talks, if only inside Grey’s head, “Upgrade” will now be a sort of buddy picture. Grey and Stem (voice of Simon Maiden) discuss tactics and ethics – the implant is less humane than the man – while dodging the cop assigned to the case (Betty Gabriel) and dispensing rough justice to the killers. First-person-shooter-style video-game mayhem ensues, from here to the plot’s final twists.
In one scene, our hero bursts into a decrepit warehouse and finds a bunch of real-world dropouts in thrall to their VR headsets – a form of entertainment that’s clearly less cool than Grey’s choice, a turntable that plays vintage blues tunes. Yet “Upgrade” can’t really offer a chilling new vision of a tech-dominated future, because all its warnings are borrowed from bummed-out sci-fi of the past.