“The movie is basically 95 minutes with a really

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“The movie is basically 95 minutes with a really, really skillful tech support person. Simon Maiden provides the voice, and if he’s not the guy who does the voice prompts for United Airlines’ 800 number, he’s the guy they should call when the other guy is busy.”

This sounds like fun. Mostly 'fresh tomatoes' on RT, and the weather is turning to shit alongside Lake Michigan right now so..............

Frenetic revenge thriller 'Upgrade' takes STEM to a whole new level

Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) seeks vengeance in Leigh Whannell's "Upgrade."
Courtesy of BH Tilt
Dann Gire


"Upgrade" -- ★ ★ ★
The most disturbing take-away from Leigh Whannell's cyberpunked exploitation action thriller "Upgrade" might be that technology won't have to wage war to gain control of us and dictate our moral and ethical decisions.

Nope. We citizens will hand over our bothersome free will with the same level of thought we use when clicking on those never-read "terms of use" disclaimers on computers.

Granted, this Terminator-inspired "Death Wish" tale of revenge doesn't give us anything new with its lowdown on high-tech, but Whannell, energetically directing from his original screenplay, whips the story along at Jason Bourne velocity, turning its sizable plotholes into enjoyable speed bumps.

Merge the hyper-stylized combat sequences from "The Matrix" with headier elements from sci-fi's "Colossus: The Forbin Project," add a crimson splash of David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" and you'd roughly get "Upgrade."

Set in the near-future, "Upgrade" takes place in a city where police drones outnumber birds in the sky.

A presumably happy couple, technophobic vintage automobile enthusiast Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) and his wife (Melanie Vallejo) become victims of a vicious parking lot assault. Several spooky-looking guys kill her, then shoot him in the head.
But Trace doesn't die.



A police detective (Betty Gabriel) assures a gunshot victim (Logan Marshall-Green) she'll get the men who killed his wife in Leigh Whannell's frenetic and fantastic sci-fi thriller "Upgrade." - Courtesy of BH Tilt

Now a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair, the angry Trace, seeking answers and revenge, sets out to find the assailants while local cops, repped by the dedicated Detective Cortez (Betty Gabriel, splendidly memorable in "Get Out!", remain clueless, despite having access to the most omnipresent surveillance equipment in law enforcement history.

A creepy high-tech guru named Eron (Harrison Gilbertson) offers Trace a RoboCop-out option: a surgically implanted revolutionary computer chip called STEM, attached to his spinal column.
Eron invokes one of those pesky "terms of use" notifications. Trace can't tell anyone about STEM and can't be seen in public unless he stays in his wheelchair.

Trace agrees. STEM not only restores Trace's mobility, it amps up speed and power of movement. That's not all.

One day, a startled Trace hears STEM's voice inside his head. And he sounds just like Douglas Rain's deadpan delivery as HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Off go Trace and STEM to solve the mystery of the homicidal attack, a quest fraught with narrative Trojan horses, red herrings, gory fights and insane car chases.

Whannell, the creative force behind the "Saw" thrillers and "Insidious" chillers, gleefully exploits rich opportunities for dark comedy, especially when wheelchair-bound Trace talks tough to an even tougher clientele at a bar.

Marshall-Green, who bears a strong resemblance to actor Tom Hardy, goes full-throttle with a character that could have been played by horror star Bruce Campbell back in his "Evil Dead" days.
Marshall-Green's reactions of disbelief at what STEM makes Trace do are priceless, humanizing moments, ones that anchor Whannell's fantastic, frenetic tale that gives new literal meaning to "hand guns" and "well-armed."

'Upgrade' review: Digital cockroaches replace human brains in this extremely gory thriller


Michael PhillipsContact ReporterChicago Tribune

The fairly peppy, extremely gory science fiction thriller “Upgrade” was originally titled “Stem,” referring to a digital cockroach (“a new, better brain,” its pale inventor notes) implanted in the body of the protagonist.

The time is the near future. The place is a world of driverless cars and Siri-like communications and control systems designed to reassure the human population while undermining its autonomy in this forbidding vision of Earth as a hellhole of convenience.

Our hero is an analog tough guy, a mechanic who loves tinkering with late 20th century muscle cars. The mechanic’s name is Grey Trace because the name Speckuva Human was already taken, and he’s played by Logan Marshall-Green, an actor of considerable, nimble physicality and trace elements of Ashton Kutcher in his line readings.

Writer-director Leigh Whannell gets right to it. Grey and his corporate drone wife, Asha (Melanie Vallejo), become victims of a brutal mugging that leaves Asha mortally wounded and Grey hanging on for dear life, while surveillance drones capture it all live. At death’s door, Grey’s saved by a complete artificial overhaul, including the smartbug critter invented by the tech genius with the sallow complexion (Harrison Gilbertson, on what might be termed a Jared Leto summer internship). This renders him superhumanly lethal and superDUPER fast with the knife and martial arts skills.

“Upgrade” follows a straight line, as Grey pursues the thugs who offed his wife. All the while the voice of the robo-roach purrs in his brain, giving him instructions, reminding him when it’s time to let the bug inside take control of the operating system, aka Grey’s bio-engineered body.

The movie is basically 95 minutes with a really, really skillful tech support person. Simon Maiden provides the voice, and if he’s not the guy who does the voice prompts for United Airlines’ 800 number, he’s the guy they should call when the other guy is busy.

The movie pumps a lot of blood and viscera with the occasional witty rejoinder. (It’s amusing to hear the voice nag its humanoid host to “clean up the vomit in the sink.”) Grey’s adversaries include a hired gun whose gun is concealed inside his forearm. I’ve sort of had it with that stuff.

More interesting by far is Betty Gabriel, the ringer of the “Get Out” ensemble cast. Here she makes do as the police detective assigned to solve the murder of Asha and to shovel the exposition, and investigate why Grey, who uses a wheelchair after the initial attack, keeps turning up in the vicinity of dead bodies in rough parts of town. (The movie was made in Melbourne, Australia.)

Whannell was a key collaborator on the “Saw” franchise, as well as the “Insidious” franchise, and he remains devoted to body horror for shock effect. We’re constantly witnessing sliced jawbones and severed whatevers, and as director (this is his second feature) Whannell is learning how forward motion can allow a filmmaker to get away with some pretty outlandish brutality.

I wish the talk-dependent sequences weren’t so foreshadowed and clunky; only Gabriel transcends them. It’s time for the Blumhouse empire, the shrewd paragon of the off-formula low-budget genre picture, to take this performer off the sidelines and onto her own damn movie.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
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"Upgrade" -- 2.5 stars
MPAA rating: R (for strong violence, grisly images and language)
Running time: 1:35

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