Upgrade

The sec­ond film (after 2015’s Insid­i­ous: Chap­ter 3) to be writ­ten and direct­ed by Leigh Whan­nell, Upgrade opens with a con­tra­dic­tion. After the names of the film’s var­i­ous pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies, and even its title, are read out in a Siri-like voice to the accom­pa­ni­ment of CG imagery, we see Grey Trace (Logan Mar­shall-Green) work­ing on the motor of a clas­sic Fire­bird Trans Am.

It is the future, but Grey sur­rounds him­self with the pre-com­put­er detri­tus of the 20^th cen­tu­ry – an ana­logue man in a dig­i­tal age. When a gang shoots his wife (Melanie Valle­jo) dead and leaves him a para­plegic, our Lud­dite pro­tag­o­nist has an exper­i­men­tal implant attached to his spine by cyber­net­ics genius Eron (Har­ri­son Gilbert­son) and finds him­self occu­py­ing a Grey area between his own human con­scious­ness and the high-tech sys­tem (named STEM, and voiced by Simon Maid­en) now coor­di­nat­ing his bod­i­ly actions.

This is, at least ini­tial­ly, a revenge-dri­ven action film, as Grey goes after the men (them­selves bion­i­cal­ly enhanced) who ruined his life, and dis­cov­ers that STEM can do things with his body that he could nev­er him­self do before. As a con­se­quence, the fight sequences are refresh­ing­ly odd in their con­cep­tion, with Grey an awk­ward pup­pet to his own kick­ass moves. Yet Whannell’s film also brings a tech­no­log­i­cal upgrade to Robert Louis Stevenson’s ​‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, as the hybrid Grey becomes ever more con­flict­ed with him­self in a strug­gle for con­trol as much inter­nal as external.

Marshall-Green’s oft-noticed resem­blance to the star of Marvel’s forth­com­ing Ven­om means that Upgrade is one of two films released this year that will see a Tom Hardy-like hero doing bat­tle with his oth­er half. In one way or anoth­er, though, it is Whannell’s film that is the singularity.