Leigh Whannell wrote and directed Upgrade, a 2018 action thriller about a man who gets a second chance at his own body and spends it on revenge. Logan Marshall-Green plays Grey Trace, an auto mechanic in 2046 who is paralyzed in a mugging that also kills his wife. A tech billionaire named Eron Keen offers him a chip called STEM, and Grey accepts. The film runs 100 minutes and premiered at South by Southwest on 10 March 2018 before opening in the United States on 1 June.
Trailer, via Blumhouse.
Grey Trace and the Chip Called STEM
The setup is clean. Grey is a technophobe. Asha, his wife, works for Cobalt, one of the companies building human-computer augmentations. He asks her to help him return a refurbished car to Eron Keen, a renowned tech innovator and his client. At Eron’s home, Grey sees STEM for the first time — a chip that can manage a human’s motor functions.
On the way home, the self-driving car malfunctions and crashes. Four men kill Asha and shoot Grey in the neck, severing his spinal cord. He comes home months later in a wheelchair, a quadriplegic, cared for by his mother, Pamela. Detective Cortez cannot identify the attackers. Grey sinks into depression, then attempts suicide.
That is when Eron returns with the implant. Grey regains control of his limbs. He signs a non-disclosure agreement and must pretend he is still paralyzed. Then STEM starts talking to him.
A Voice in His Head and a Man Named Serk
STEM speaks in Grey’s mind, and Simon Maiden voices it. The chip says it can help Grey get revenge. It identifies one of the assailants, Serk Brantner, from a drone video feed of the murder. Grey breaks into Serk’s home and finds proof Serk was “upgraded” through a secret military experiment. The trail also connects Serk to a bar called the Old Bones.
Serk arrives and attacks. STEM convinces Grey to give up control of his body, and STEM turns Grey into a lethally efficient fighting machine. Grey kills Serk with little effort. Grey is not the one driving. He is watching.
Detective Cortez later sees drone footage of Grey’s wheelchair approaching Serk’s house. His apparent paralysis clears him as a suspect. Eron tracks STEM’s movements and berates Grey for his vigilantism. Grey reveals that STEM is speaking to him.
What the Cast Does With It
Marshall-Green carries the movie. He has to play two performances at once — a man and the thing riding inside him — and the switch between them is the film’s best trick. Betty Gabriel’s Detective Cortez is the closest thing to a grounded presence, a cop working a case that keeps pointing at a man who cannot walk.
Harrison Gilbertson plays Eron Keen as a boy genius with a product to protect. Melanie Vallejo’s Asha exists mostly to be lost, which is the script’s weakest choice. Benedict Hardie plays Fisk, and Richard Cawthorne plays Serk. The rest of the crew fill out the roster.
- Logan Marshall-Green as Grey Trace
- Betty Gabriel as Detective Cortez
- Harrison Gilbertson as Eron Keen
- Melanie Vallejo as Asha Trace
- Benedict Hardie as Fisk
- Richard Cawthorne as Serk
- Simon Maiden as the voice of STEM
The Action Is the Argument
Whannell stages the violence with a camera that behaves like a machine. The fights are fast, close and oddly beautiful, and the tagline — “Not man. Not machine. More.” — is the whole thesis in five words. The film is cyberpunk in its bones: corporate augmentation, a self-driving car that fails, a chip that can take a body away from its owner.
The dark humor lands more often than it misses. The movie knows how absurd it is that a quadriplegic’s revenge tour is being run by software, and it lets Grey be horrified by his own hands.
Where the Movie Slips
The plot is a revenge fantasy wearing a science-fiction coat. Critics called it “one part The Six Million Dollar Man, one part Death Wish revenge fantasy,” and that is an accurate description of what is on screen. The middle section — Grey working through the list of men who killed his wife — is the least interesting part, because the outcome is never in doubt.
The film’s real subject is control, and it keeps interrupting that subject to stage another kill. STEM’s growing influence over Grey is the thread worth pulling. The movie pulls it, but late.
A $3 Million Budget and $17 Million Back
Upgrade was produced by Jason Blum under Blumhouse Productions. It made $17 million on a $3 million budget and drew positive reviews. That ratio is the story of its release: a small, mean, inventive genre picture that found an audience without a franchise behind it.
The film’s closing stretch is where it commits hardest. STEM’s hold on Grey stops being a question the movie is asking and becomes the thing it is about — a man who hands over his body to get what he wants, and the driver who ends up in the seat.
The Verdict on Upgrade
Upgrade is a good B-movie with an A-grade idea. Marshall-Green’s dual performance is the reason to watch it, and the action sequences are sharper than the budget suggests. What holds it back is a script that treats its own premise as a delivery system for fight scenes rather than the fight scenes’ reason to exist. The chip is the character. The revenge is the errand.
The dark humor and the action earned the praise they got. The thin middle keeps it from being more.
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