LEIGH Whannell has carved himself a fairly major part of the modern horror landscape, having co-created and written two of the genre’s most successful franchises in recent memory with Saw and Insidious, while making his directorial debut with the third chapter of the latter.
Now he returns with his second feature as a director and is certainly not messing around with a wonderfully out-there slice of high-concept action sci-fi.
Events are set in the near-future where technology, and particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI), is a staple part of life; self-driving cars that talk, robotic arms helping around the house, governmental drones patrolling the streets.
Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) is a stay-at-home mechanic with a slight aversion to and distrust of all this fancy new technology. While out for a ride one night with his much more tech-savvy wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo), something malfunctions with their AI-controlled car and it crashes. This leads them into the path of a vicious group of attackers who shoot his wife dead and stab Grey in the back, leaving him as a quadriplegic.
Feeling utterly hopeless, Grey is approached by Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), the tech genius head of a company who specialises in AI, who claims he can give him the ability to not only walk again but increase his strength and agility immeasurably with the use of an experimental and revolutionary computer chip known as “Stem”.
Once implanted, he starts to realise he can use it to track down those responsible for the attack, leading him on a quest of gory revenge. But soon he also discovers that the technology now inside him isn’t all that it seems.
Take the best bits of Robocop, The Terminator and The Six Million Dollar Man, the heart of a horror B-movie and the focus of a bloody revenge story, smash it together in a blender and you’re somewhere pretty close to what Upgrade is – something thrilling, ferocious, bold and delightfully bonkers, wearing its influences unashamedly on its sleeve while also delivering something distinct and memorable in its own right.
It wraps its tale of vengeful carnage in a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology and what it means when it begins to rule our lives. In Grey’s case it’s quite literally as the lines start to blur between man and machine, humanity and artificiality.
It’s about as subtle as a robot punch to the face, mind you, but restraint isn’t exactly its factory setting and there’s something admirable about a film that doesn’t hide its true intentions. The fact that you feel the director is fully aware of just how ridiculous the concept is, embracing that fact rather than running scared of it, makes it all the more effective.
Whannell shows fresh talent for slick action, infused with knowingly ridiculous graphic visuals and impressive fight choreography, in a way that makes the most out of the technology that it presents as reality. And it makes all the difference that the driving force of all the mayhem is a surprisingly affecting performance by Marshall-Green, grounding things just enough in humanity to make us care whenever it launches off into another mad set-piece.
It’s not to everyone’s taste, for sure, but a blast for those willing to take the leap into its crazy waters.
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