REVIEW: Upgrade (2018) - MITM #1
What would happen if the creator of "Saw" remade the Steve Martin/Lily Tomlin comedy "All of Me" with a baby-faced Elon Musk? 2018's "Upgrade." That’s what.
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– SPOILERS AHEAD –
THE STORY:
When I sat down to watch 2018’s Upgrade, I was expecting a zippy, concept-heavy sci-fi flick with lots of shiny dark surfaces and people hunched over keyboards shouting about overriding protocols. Instead, it was more of a horror-inflected RoboCop. Set in the near future, it centers on Grey Trace (played by Tom Hardy Logan Marshall-Green). He is A Man’s Man, and we know this because he works on cars and has a beard. His wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) is A Modern Woman, which we know because she has a job but wears extremely revealing clothing. After delivering one of his cars to a mysterious child billionaire who lives underground somewhere by the ocean, Grey and Asha are mugged. She is murdered, he is left a quadriplegic. When Mr. Baby Billionaire tells him that he has invented a brain implant that will give him full mobility just in time to seek revenge on Asha’s murderers, Grey is implanted with STEM and becomes a literal weapon. Not only can STEM speak to Grey, but it can manipulate his body however it wishes. Violent maimings ensue, often against Grey’s will.
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THE BACKGROUND:
As any horror aficionado knows (i.e., not me until last week) the writer/director of Upgrade, Leigh Whannell, is a legend of the horror genre, having co-created the Saw and Insidious franchises. The arc of his storytelling bends towards gore, and that is obvious in this film starting with a breathtaking scene 40 minutes in when Grey attacks a man with a knife in a cluttered kitchen. It was made on a shoestring budget in Australia and likely struggled at the box office due to its teeny marketing budget and being released alongside Deadpool 2, Avengers: Infinity War, and Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Whannell said he wanted to make something “lean and mean,” “visceral,” and “violent,” and that he was influenced by ‘80s movies like RoboCop and Mad Max.
THE LETDOWNS:
I mean…the script? This movie is unintentionally uncomfortable for the first 40 minutes until everyone stops talking and it finally becomes intentionally uncomfortable. Marshall-Green’s performance is wooden, even before he loses all movement, and Vallejo as Grey’s wife plays that most classic of female roles – the woman who dies in order to provide the male protagonist with a reason to be heroic. Their scenes together are awkwardly lacking in chemistry yet extremely heavy-handed in dialogue.
Then, there is Mr. Baby Billionaire, whose actual name is Eron (now what would happen if you replaced one of those letters with a different letter?) The performance here is just one degree South of Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending. He looks and sounds as though he has permanent brain freeze. His voice is tremulous, his face is acting. He can influence the weather by glumly pulling at clouds in his basement lair. He is tortured. He is rich. We know not why. All we know is that whenever he’s on screen, the movie is more Austin Powers than RoboCop.
THE HIGHLIGHTS:
Upgrade has the opposite problem to most movies. Instead of excelling in the first act and falling apart in the third, it falls flat in the first act and soars in the third. The ending, in which it transpires that STEM has been controlling Eron the whole time and Grey is simply the final pawn needed for the technology to become humanoid, is exactly how you might imagine such a scenario playing out.
The violence is, as Whannell intended, extremely visceral. The fight scenes are beautifully choreographed, thanks, perhaps, to the use of a dance coordinator in addition to the stunt coordinator. Achieving this immediacy and tension may also have been the result of the smallness of the budget. Large-scale stunts were out of the question, making everything, by necessity, up close and personal.
THE VERDICT:
This is a great concept for 2024. Whannell started writing Upgrade just after the first Insidious movie (released in 2010), which is pretty impressive considering the film is exploring some of the most terrifying implications of artificial intelligence. It’s hard to imagine Upgrade having the same impact then as it does in a post-ChatGPT/Neuralink world.
Concept aside, the film is pretty clunky. Whannell said in an interview that a producer on the film suggested he add some scenes to create more character development. This is unheard of. Producers are always the ones trying to cut scenes. He definitely should have listened to them. And maybe gotten a co-writer to rewrite the dialogue.
THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF MOVIES IN THE MIDDLE IS…
People Places Things (2015)
DESCRIPTION: “Will Henry, an author and a professor, finds it difficult to juggle being a single parent and fulfill his obligations of a writer, owing to his writer's block, whilst dealing with his students.”
I will watch anything with Flight of the Concord’s Jamaine Clement. And this looks like it might be good regardless of his performance.
WHERE TO WATCH: Available to rent everywhere. Free (with ads) on Tubi in the U.S.
See you on July 4!
Geez, who cares about the movies, let me just read the reviews! Even if the movie is awful, the entire experience is enjoyable. Perhaps it's like global day-length: the North pole gets just as much annual daylight as Quito, Ecuador. That is, the light sum is the same for the two locations, though while one is at its zenith the other is at its nadir. So, the worse the movie, the more entertaining the review. The audience is guaranteed a good experience. (Perhaps this is a strained analogy.)