UPGRADE IN NEED OF AN UPGRADE
Excess of fighting and special effects reduces thriller to generic shoot-’em-up
The science-fiction movie Upgrade raises a lot of questions about the future. Questions such as: Are computers poised to take over the world? If a piece of technology kills someone, who is ultimately to blame? And what if you were able to fuse the rugged good looks of Tom Hardy with the acting style of Keanu Reeves?
Writer-director Leigh Whannell answers that last one, thanks to his lead actor Logan MarshallGreen, but he mostly skirts the larger implications of the movie’s other big queries.
And he never satisfactorily resolves the poser that kept floating through my head, in the style of a song by Joan Osborne:
What if HAL was one of us?
Marshall- Green plays Grey Trace, which makes him sound like decaf tea. He is in fact an old-school auto mechanic in a near-future world that features driverless cars but also, for some reason, still no adoption of the metric system in America.
One night, he and his wife (Melanie Vallejo) deliver a restored Smokey-and-the-bandit era Trans Am to twitchy tech gazillionaire Eron (Harrison Gilbertson), but run afoul of carjackers on the way home.
She is killed; he is left a quadriplegic. Eron then visits Grey in hospital and offers an experimental bit of tech called Stem, which will nestle in his severed spinal column and restore the use of his body. One caveat: He has to keep it a secret, and pretend to be paralyzed when anyone else is around.
Grey is initially happy with the results, until the super-intelligent Stem starts talking to him inside his head, offering to help him find his wife’s killers.
Stem is voiced by Simon Maiden, but the aural resemblance to HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey is uncanny. The first time Grey runs into trouble, Stem offers to take over control of his body, and darned if he doesn’t also take over the movie’s cinematography; the camera ducks and weaves like a punchdrunk boxer whenever the A.I. is running things. The bloodied state of the first thug taken on by this man/machine hybrid reminds us that the director started off as writer of the Saw franchise.
Grey’s main target is Fisk (Benedict Hardie), a military type who seems to have a few upgrades of his own — honestly, this film just makes up new technology as it goes along. But he is also dogged by Detective Cortez (Betty Gabriel), one of those movie cops who seems to have just one crime to solve, and won’t be stopped by anything. She’s pretty young or I’d also suspect she plans to retire after this case.
Upgrade, which opened several weeks ago in the U.S. before quietly sneaking into Canada, starts off strong, even darkly funny. But the screenplay piles on fight scenes and special effects with nary a pause for reflection. There’s a time for thinking and a time for action, it seems to be saying, and this is no time for thinking. It’s a pity. Upgrade has the makings of a thought-provoking thriller, but downgrades itself to a generic sci-fi shoot’em-up instead.