Unruly, irresistible cyber-trash
★★★★☆ Dir Leigh Whannell
Starring Logan Marshall-green, Melanie Vallejo, Betty Gabriel, Rosco Campbell, Richard Cawthorne, Michael M Foster, Harrison Gilbertson
Upgrade is wild trash with a don’ttry-this-at-home plot. Imagine being a car mechanic in the near future, played by Logan Marshallgreen, and being paralysed during a street mugging where you also witness your beautiful wife (Melanie Vallejo) being shot dead. Then imagine rising from your wheelchair and walking, thanks to a hi-tech chip implanted in your spinal cord. And then imagine the chip taking over entirely.
This bit of kit, nicknamed STEM by its billionaire-geek inventor Eron (Harrison Gilbertson), is the upgrade. Not for nothing is he a mere consonant away from Elon Musk, he of the “transhumanist” ventures to transform the world with artificial intelligence.
The script, by Saw and Insidious writer Leigh Whannell, toys with some of these ideas in its palm, placing us in a world of fully automated cars that speak to their owners, but also take wrong turns into the dodgy part of town, which is how the nightmare for Grey (Marshall-green) begins.
Mainly, though, Whannell – also directing, for the second time after his nifty Insidious 3 – leaps off from the exhilaratingly silly gambit of watching Grey turn into a robocontrolled revenge machine. As in Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, foremost among the slew of down-and-dirty sci-fi films this recalls, his de facto resurrection allows him to get to the bottom of who nearly killed him.
STEM, providing spoken instructions in his head, explains that Grey has the option of walking around under his own volition, or of ceding control in dangerous situations. The first of these arises when he tracks down one of the culprits and must defend himself from a knife attack. On goes STEM, and every part of Grey below the neck reacts with the split-second timing of a master ninja, while his face responds with terrified astonishment.
These are the funniest moments in Upgrade, and also the most thrilling. It’s a rare thing: an action film on a low budget (less than $5 million) that manages mano a mano set pieces that would be the envy of the Bourne franchise. There’s one bravura camera trick, not unlike the drunken lock on to Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets, where an iphone was strapped to Marshall-green, and the shot follows every move of his muscles, as if STEM were also suddenly in charge of the photography.
In truth, budgetary constraint is more obvious elsewhere – there’s a scrimp-and-save car chase that blatantly reuses the same strip of freeway constantly. But the film generally has the smarts, like early Cronenberg, to pare down its story in a clean, spare way, and ramps up the suspense with verve. Grey must race to a hacker midway to stop Eron disabling STEM’S support remotely, and reaches a warehouse full of zombie-like gamers adrift in their VR headsets: a location peddling ingenious cyber-punk atmosphere on the cheap.
There’s a good use of Get Out’s Betty Gabriel as a suspicious cop, but none of the actors gets to flex their capabilities as sexily as Marshall-green, finally given a chance here to live up to his Prometheus potential, and scoring a knockout. Like Robocop’s Peter Weller, he’s both pitiful and sardonic, and does beautifully specific physical work without hamming up the robot moves. His features are hilariously stricken in these bits, and when the script throws him a crowd-pleasing kicker of a punchline, it brings the house down. Never more should this guy suffer the indignity of being called a poor man’s Tom Hardy, bizarrely twinnish though the resemblance might be.
Right up to its cold humdinger of a payoff, Upgrade has unruly momentum to spare. Descartes might have coined the whole notion of a mind-body split, but could never have foreseen it pitched as such crazy spectacle. TR