Mark Reviews Movies: UPGRADE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 31, 2018

There are some fascinating ideas driving the plot of Upgrade, a futuristic revenge thriller in which a man finds himself acting as both the vessel for and the puppet of an artificial intelligence. The core ideas, of course, come the line between the man's two roles in regards to the A.I. If the man has a computer's voice in his head offering advice and knows that those suggestions come from a process of thought that's far more complex than his own, are his own thoughts really worth much? When the A.I. takes control of his body, as it is capable of doing, is the man legally or even morally culpable for the actions that his body performs?

Is he a more advanced and, dare it be said, better human being? Is he technically even human anymore?

Such questions arise, but they're mostly ignored over the course of writer/director Leigh Whannell's movie. The central purpose is less about the murky questions that come with the conceit and more about the general sense of excitement that such a conceit could generate. It's a movie filled with some nifty gimmicks and some brutal fight sequences, and it must be said that Whannell clearly sets our expectations for that intent. To put it another way, we're not supposed to be thinking about the consequences of having an artificial intelligence transplanted into a person's brain. We are, though, supposed to be thinking that such a situation might be kind of cool.

To that end, the movie is fairly entertaining, especially when it imagines the many ways that an A.I. implant could enhance the human experience. Our protagonist Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) rejects the technology of his world of the future, but within a few minutes of learning just a bit of what his new computer chip can do, he's pretty much all on board for this new way of living.

To get to that point, though, there is a pretty obvious, straightforward plot. Grey fixes old-fashioned, gasoline-powered cars for a living, selling them to those who want to hold on to the past or to have an antique to show off to their friends. One of his clients is Eron (Harrison Gilbertson), the reclusive CEO of a technology company who has invented a yet-to-be-approved neural implant called Stem.

On their way home from the genius' underground fortress in the woods, Grey and his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) end up in a bad part of town, due to a malfunctioning self-driving car. Asha is killed by goons with firearms implanted in their arms, and Grey is shot through the spine, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.

The solution to Grey's current state and Eron's need for a human trial for Stem is to install the chip in Grey's brain. Grey can walk again, and he also discovers that Stem has a voice (Simon Maiden) that only he can hear. With the investigation into Asha's murder—led by Detective Cortez (Betty Gabriel)—at a standstill, Stem, with its ability to see things invisible to the human eye, offers its own investigative prowess. Soon enough, Grey is tracking down the killers, disguising himself as the quadriplegic he recently was and officially is to keep the cops off his own trail.

The primary gimmick is that Stem can, indeed, take control of Grey's body when given consent by its host. This would appear to provide Grey with an advantage when facing off against stronger and/or more adept opponents, but the running joke, emphasized by Maiden's deadpan voice work, is that Stem appears to be capable only of overkill. The fights here are over-the-top in their viciousness and the bloodiness of Grey/Stem's coups de grâce. Whannell obviously takes great joy in the mostly one-sided beatings, as he and cinematographer Stefan Duscio employ a series of unnaturally precise tracking shots to follow Grey during the fights (If he falls, the camera falls with him, and when he seemingly stands up on his heels, the camera rises at the exact angle).

The fights themselves aren't quite as invigoratingly choreographed as Whannell appears to believe they are, but that's of little matter. What sets them apart is Marshall-Green's performance, as he reacts with guilt and horror to the brutality and gore that his possessed body is causing. The movie often veers toward comedy, mostly in the juxtaposition within the fights but also in Grey playing an innocent bystander to Cortez—just the wrong guy in the wrong place at a time when a lot carnage is happening to men he would want dead.

Without exploring the ideas behind this conceit, though, Whannel's screenplay sets a marker for its own success: the movie's ability to continuously raise the bar of its visceral thrills. It doesn't achieve that mark, if only because the movie's fights, as visually busy and macabrely amusing as they may be, become a bit repetitive. The occasional change-ups to the action, in the form of some chases (on foot and in cars), feel equally routine.

The dark closing moments do open up almost as many tough questions as the premise, but considering how the movie values action over ideas, both sets of questions hardly matter. Upgrade does come close to doing something a bit different with the action-based mold, and that makes it sporadically rousing and ultimately disappointing.

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