If I didn’t know Leigh Whannell were about my age, I’d certainly have guessed it. The Saw series he cocreated with director James Wan is firmly rooted in early ’90s industrial music-video aesthetic, and now his second film as director following Insidious: Chapter 3, Upgrade, is just as rooted in cyberpunk B-movies of the same era: think Johnny Mnemonic, Hardware, Freejack, et al. And yes, most of the titles I just mentioned were not hits; Mnemonic managed $19 million domestic on a $26 million budget, and the best thing you can say about it is that it arguably paved the way for The Matrix four years later. Upgrade doesn’t need to be huge, as it’s being released on the micro-budget, focused-marketing Blumhouse sub-label BH Tilt, and has no stars in it; it’s not clear quite how cheaply it was made (suffice it to say the visual aesthetic hasn’t suffered noticeably), but it also doesn’t seem likely to open with more than $3 million at best.
I’m told the red-band trailer for Upgrade gives a lot of the good stuff away, which is a shame, as for a while, it’s not clear where things are going. We are in the future, where skyscrapers with visible terrariums stand out across a fancily rendered CG skyline, and cars are fully driverless and shiny two-way mirror surfaced. In this world, Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) is a bit of a throwback, restoring classic vehicles for the rich and famous, including genius Aryan uber-brat Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson).
And then every technophobe’s fears of a dark future come true: the driverless family car gets hacked and crashed, Grey’s wife is murdered by guys with guns surgically implanted in their arms, and the ubiquitous police eye-in-the-sky drones prove useless for their actual purpose, because criminals have figured out their own personal distortion firewalls to block identification. Grey is left a quadriplegic, and soon enough client Eron shows up to his bedside with a proposition–test an experimental new mega-chip that can do anything in his body, and it’ll give him the power to walk again. Though he’s looking to die rather than live, Grey is persuaded to give it a try…and it works.
It also talks, and gives him special abilities, like having a combination of K.I.T.T. and HAL 9000 in the brain and eardrums. Now gifted with the skills of the world’s most powerful computer as well as his own, Grey can do what the police are unable to: find and punish his wife’s killers. But he can’t let anyone know he’s out of his wheelchair while doing it.
This isn’t the world’s most original concept; in my teens, I read a UK comic with virtually the same premise entitled M.A.C.H. 1, though it was a lot less violent. The novelty here comes in the fight scenes: unable to go toe-to-toe with the baddest of the bad, Grey lets his computer, which goes by the name of Stem (Simon Maiden), take over, and the result is akin to watching a marionette involuntarily manipulated by Yuen Woo-Ping. This is the sort of thing Jackie Chan was trying to do in The Tuxedo, a movie that suggested the hi-tech tuxedo was doing all the fighting for him, but that was impossible to buy if you know anything about Jackie Chan. Marshall-Green, however, is masterful at this novel style of computer-manipulation-fu, and you believe it.
Whannell’s world is pure William Gibson–dark slums, dungeon-like residences with technological flourishes, and hopeless addicts spending sleepless days on end in virtual reality. Grey is no Keanu Reeves here to save it; he is, as his name suggests, not especially concerned with morality outside of his own grudge. The mystery really isn’t that hard to figure out, which makes the cops of the future seem extra-stupid, but like in Whannell’s previous mega-franchise, it takes a climactic montage of “Here’s what you thought you saw” to rub it in. This in turn suggests there could be many more Upgrade installments, which I would not be opposed to in the least.
This may be a movie arriving at an awkwardly bad time in the conversation, however: Deadpool 2 recently put a big bullseye on the whole notion of “fridging,” which is to say having a female character killed in order to motivate a male protagonist to revenge. My own reaction is to think this is primarily symptomatic of a lack of female action heroes, which we can remedy; loved ones being killed as an initiating event are a classical story trope, and the upcoming Peppermint, for example, with Jennifer Garner in the lead, has her husband murdered to motivate her. Plus if you really want to get into the politics of action movies, maybe start with the notion that most of them justify shooting sprees and ignoring due process, and don’t expect to learn morality from them. Still, if it’s an issue for you, Upgrade will push your buttons and not feel like any sort of advancement.
But if you want to see William Gibson’s Death Wish–and apparently I do–click “I Agree” to Upgrade.
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