Burl reviews Upgrade! (2018)

Ha ha, it’s the state-of-the-art system known as Burl! I’m reviewing one of the newer action pictures for you today, a sweet goofula called Upgrade, which is not to be confused with that beloved character from Idiocracy, Uppgrayyde! Now, this picture is in fact not that new - the director has already made a new picture since, about an invisible guy apparently, and I’m sure I’ll have a look at that one sooner or later! Ha ha, I’d have made more of an effort to see it in the movie palace had I only known! But I trust the cinemas will rise again in time, and I fervently hope so, for there’s no better way to see a movie than on the big screen!

With that public service announcement out of the way, I’ll say a few words about Upgrade! Ha ha, the plot is fairly simple: it’s the near future, with electric self-driving cars and smart houses and so forth, and our main character, Grey, is one of those fellows who still plays records and tinkers with 1970s muscle cars! Well, he and his wife are simply too happy for us to not realize a tragedy is in the works, and pretty soon their self-driving car goes berserk and drives them to a place where a violence gang can perform their outrages!

The upshot is that Grey’s wife is killed and he is paralyzed from the waist down, with his mother as caretaker like the guy in Monkey Shines! Luckily a computer genius for whom Grey has been restoring a muscle car offers help: a computer chip that will aid him in walking, moving, and downright kung-fu fighting! But his mobility comes at a price: the chip has a name, STEM, and a voice only Grey can hear, and an increasingly demanding and peevish personality!

STEM encourages Grey to take revenge on the thugs who killed his wife, which he is able to do without much problem! Everybody else continues to believe he’s a helpless quardiplegic, but he nevertheless becomes a police suspect almost right away, ha ha, thanks to a savvy lady investigator! But the story has a few twists in it, and even if they don’t bear up under any sort of scrutiny, they seem right and even clever in the moment!

The scenes of STEM-powered vengeance-fu are the highlights of the picture, ha ha, and the physical aspects of the performance of Logan Marshall-Green from Prometheus, in the role of Grey, deserve special note! He really does a fine job of selling the idea that he’s a computer-powered human not quite in control of his own body, or sometimes in control and sometimes not, and sometimes struggling between the two! Ha ha, it’s safe to say that if the actor had not pulled this off, the movie would not have worked! And the same goes for the vocal performance by the actor playing STEM, who is in some ways the most complex character in the picture!

Altogether it’s a picture that might easily not have played, but does, thanks to a happy combination of assured direction, committed performances and solid craftsmanship from the technical crew! It’s no game-changer, but it’s a zesty little genre picture with a conclusion partially inspired by, of all films, Brazil! I give Upgrade two and a half deadly sneezes!