Upgrade

My nephew Jimmy, who was recently promoted to being in charge of the entire Gameboy Advance section at Gamestop, once told me that conversations get really fucking deep once the store closes and the employees are left to re-alphabetize the inventory. I assumed he meant they debated whether J comes before K, or maybe which version of Lara Croft was best for tittyfucking. But he said way deeper than that. Too deep for someone like me to understand.

Now that I’ve seen Upgrade, I have a better idea what he meant. This movie definitely feels like the sort of shit Jimmy thinks about at two a.m. while coming down from a Mountain Dew Code Red buzz. It’s the stuff he and his friends plan to write about in the sci-fi ‘zine they’re gonna start as soon as Maurnold’s mom dies and leaves her house to him. First, a huge virtual-reality rig, followed by the best Deadpool cosplay uniform money can buy. Then, they know a guy who has Frodo’s real dagger from Lord of the Rings. But after that, the ‘zine, which they’ll name “if…” Lowercase.

Upgrade is that fucking deep, a mindfuck for dudes who debate the meaning of Heinlein novels. It’s a slow-starting slasher-thriller set in some vague, cheaply constructed and inconsistently visioned tomorrow where the question is who is in control: man or machine?

Whoa.

Upgrade is set in the future… or as much future as a very limited budget allows. There are whirring surveillance drones, autonomous cars (well, one anyway; it looks like the budget didn’t allow for more than a single Toyota Prius covered in plastic plates), computer screens that appear in thin air, and omnipotent computers. There are also police cars tricked out with neon light kits from the JC Whitney catalog. The hero’s house looks like someone bullet-proofed the Brady Bunch house, and the surrounding city hasn’t changed in however much time has passed. A place called Old Bones looks like a biker bar from an episode of CHiPS. The bad guys drive Toyota minivans with low-rent window tint and have guns built into their forearms with bullet loaders in their biceps (seriously).

So, the future looks like a Roger Corman movie, except the producers didn’t budget wisely and ran out of cash halfway through. So every interior looks like converted warehouse space, and everyone’s outfit suggest fashion has not changed whatsoever. Also, the most powerful computer in the world can be hacked by a stranger in 90 seconds. At least in Roger Corman’s future there are exposed nipples.

Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is the hero. He’s a luddite who fixes up muscle cars because writer-director Leigh Whannel’s idea of what men who work with their hands comes from romance novels sold in truck stops. Grey is married to a woman who has embraced technology and works for a company that makes smart prosthetics for war veterans. Because, again, Whannel is painting with primary colors here. I almost want to say he is trying to tell us an allegory and not a story, but either way, its shit.

Grey and his wife have no chemistry and barely seem to get along. I have no idea how they got together or why they stay together. But they only do until her smart car goes haywire, crashes into a hobo encampment. The lovers are set upon by thugs who kill her and sever his spine.

Grey becomes a despondent quadriplegic prone to some very convincing drooling and puking. That is, until a reclusive genius named Eron (Harrison Gilbertson) offers to implant a super-secret bug-sized supercomputer into his spine that will allow him to move again, as long as he promises not to tell anyone about it.

As would anyone with a brain the size of a squirrel’s dick, Grey quickly agrees to this dubious offer from a man he hardly knows, and who is creepy as fuck. Upon regaining the use of his limbs, the hero’s first actions are not to jerk off and then take a shower. No, it’s to becomes a vigilante on a quest for the find the people who killed the wife he wasn’t really compatible with. Luckily, he has STEM, the supercomputer implanted in his neck, which has super vision, access to the Internet, and high-quality martial arts moves built in.

There is virtually no better way to keep a secret than by going out and beating people up.

STEM also has bloodlust, and whenever it takes over Grey’s body, it kills. It slices open one guy’s face, slashes up another guy, breaks arms and blasts off heads. The blood is enough to give Grey some moral qualms. I think those are there to make us not hate him, but they aren’t strong enough to keep him from going back out to find more people to kill.

Meanwhile, there is a cop (Betty Gabriel) assigned to his wife’s case. Just one cop. She never coordinates with any other police, seems to have no interest in constitutional rights or procedure, and has enough access to computers to track Grey but not the bad guys. She also has that sweet Dodge Avenger with the tricked out neon. She wonders why a quadriplegic keeps showing up at the scene of gruesome murders. See, because his STEM-powered mobility is a secret. She fails completely at finding the bad guys but excels at suspecting a cripple.

A mercifully short and silly path through murderers, former soldiers, hackers straight out of a Law and Order episode, and speeded-up fisticuffs leads Grey to the real bad guy, who is… (stop reading right here if you don’t want to make a loved one clean your brains off the monitor because your mind is about ex-fucking-plode) the reclusive Eron! That’s right! The genius who promised to help actually killed Grey’s wife and severed his spine.

Occam’s Razor and all, he is the most obvious explanation since he looks like an even more pedophilic version of Justin Bieber, and acts like a guy with a trench coat and a journal full of bomb diagrams and lists of people. In other words, Upgrade’s twist is about as well-hidden a secret as the Harelip’s neck goiter.

Upgrade reserves one last mindfuck, though. Eron was being controlled by STEM! So, it was the computer all along! Yes, the super smart computer that led Grey right back to himself. Smart one, STEM.

Upgrade is like an Ayn Rand convention, a place everyone is only half as clever as they think they are. On an almost scene by scene basis this movie undercuts its own logic in a rush to get to its big, dumb-ass obvious climax. Is it real-life or virtual? Are we in control, or are the computers just letting us think we are? These are questions for idiots to ponder, things for store clerks to debate in the middle of the night because there are no answers, so you can talk out your ass to other idiots without being wrong. Two Fingers.