Movie Breakdown: Upgrade

Pre-Screening Stance:

Upgrade looks bonkers.  Hard not to be excited about it.

Post-Screening Ramble:

Unfortunately, I found Upgrade to be more of a chore than anything else.  I was expecting a healthy mix of sci fi, action and comedy, and while the film does indeed contain a lot of those things, I can’t say that it does any of it particularly well.  The film is set in the future, though I’m not really sure how far in the future.  There’s talk of human-operated cars becoming rare, but outside of two or three people, no one seems to own a self driving vehicle.  Maybe it’s set in the not too distant future, like 2019?  In any case, the film’s main guy, Grey (Logan Marshall-Green), becomes a quadriplegic during an accident that also claims his wife’s life.  Since the movie takes place only about six months from now, medical tech is pretty much the same, which means he’s shit out of luck.  Or at least he is until Eron (Harrison Gilbertson) shows up and offers to implant a “state of the art” (it looks like a cheap piece of metal) chip that will allow him to walk again.  Grey accepts and things go pretty smoothy until the chip, STEM (Simon Maiden), reveals that it can talk.  Under normal circumstances, Grey probably would have freaked out, but his girl is dead and he’s angry, so he goes about using STEM to find out whether the accident was actually an accident.  The first fight is exciting and fun, as Grey is practically superhuman with STEM controlling his every move, but it’s not long before things become rather repetitive – Grey starts something, he gets beat up, STEM takes over, they win.  The same goes for the near-buddy cop humor shared between Grey and STEM – initially it’s pretty clever and entertaining, then it becomes tiresome since they’re both fairly flat characters.  Oh well.

Upgrade certainly has some fun moments and it’s a movie with a slew of great ideas, but it suffers from poor execution across the board.  Skip seeing it on the big screen and wait to catch it at home.

One Last Thought:

There’s a lot of dudes in this movie who have guns built directly into their arms.  Other than not having to physically carry a gun, I couldn’t figure out why it was a thing.  It’s an obvious body modification and the bullets have to be inserted manually, so there’s nothing stealthy about it.  I guess the bad guys just don’t like holding things.