It seems like since John Wick released to surprise (and earned) praise in 2014, we’ve had a spate of revenge thrillers. From the pale pretenders and copycats like Nobody, to the ultra violent and unforgiving shoot ‘em ups like Wrath of Man, shows that forgot about the thrill part like Black Doves, to emotionally deep and affecting films like the cheesily named, but excellent Riders of Justice and the quiet, contemplative Pig, it seems like every time you turn around, there’s a new revenge thriller coming out. Some are great, like the aforementioned Riders of Justice and Pig, also Monkey Man, and most of the John Wick sequels (Wick 3 dragged a little, but Wick 4 was more than good enough to justify its nearly three hour runtime), some are less successful, like The Foreigner, which was such a forgettable waste of Jackie Chan’s talents that I can barely remember that I watched it, let alone what happened.
Today, I want to tell you about another revenge thriller that you might have missed when it first came around, Upgrade. Released in 2018, it was kind of overshadowed by Venom, even though it was a critical success with an 88% RT score and 88% audience score. It stars Logan Marshall-Green, whereas Venom has Tom Hardy, and to be honest, back in 2018, I used to mix the two up all the time. Logan Marshall-Green seemed like an American Tom Hardy, the kind of guy you get when you want an outstanding actor in the role, but don’t necessarily want the cost of an A-list superstar like Hardy (if you really want to see a showcase of his abilities as an actor, check out 2015’s The Invitation, an excellent horror indie—and readers, you know horror is not my genre, so I think it’s really something special if I’m mentioning it). And Marshall-Green brings it in this movie, as I’ve come to expect from him. In addition to a gruff, but handsome white guy, both movies feature a second voice in their heads that is more than slightly murderous at times. And, to top it all off, Venom had a recognizable IP behind it and Upgrade did not, and despite the spectacular failure that is Sony’s Spider-Villain-verse, and the fact that Venom was terrible, it was successful enough to get a few sequels and Upgrade is a seemingly forgotten movie. Which is a shame, because it’s quite good.
Upgrade opens on our protagonist Grey working on a 1970s Pontiac Firebird Trans Am in his garage. He’s getting dirty, working with his hands, and when he drops the engine in, he celebrates it firing up by cracking open a beer. It’s a very Hank Hill start to a movie about a futuristic world in which robots and AI run much of our lives and there’s constant drone surveillance with facial recognition. Grey’s wife Asha returns home from work in a self-driving electric car that looks like a futuristic Lamborghini Urus with blacked out windows, all angular and sleek. The contrast couldn’t be more evident; it’s not just the Firebird or his 1971 Dodge Challenger that’s the anachronism, it’s Grey himself. He’s an analogue man in a digital world, and he’s happy to keep it that way. Frankly, I understand the impulse; I briefly had an Apple Watch, wore it for about an hour, and promptly returned it before going back to a mechanical watch, fatigued by the constant connectivity and alerts (as much as I wanted to feel like Dick Tracy, talking into my watch, the gimmick wore thin really fast), I drive a car with a manual transmission and wouldn’t have it any other way. I get it. Grey doesn’t want or need to be connected all the time, which is increasingly difficult in our world now, but even more so in the near future world of Upgrade, where Cyberpunk 2077-like cybernetic implants are the norm and your coffee table displays your emails. Opt me out of that, please.
Grey tells Asha that he wants her to accompany him to drop off the Firebird for a client because he can’t take the self-driving car back, since he doesn’t know how to use it and he’s afraid he’d press the wrong button and end up in a different country. When dropping off the car to reclusive tech genius Eron Keen (that’s right, not Elon; Eron, pronounced like Erin), Asha fangirls a bit—turns out she works for one of his competitors and is a big fan of his work. He’s then prompted to show off his newest piece of technology, a chip called Stem. Grey is of course unimpressed by the chip that can do just about anything; where Eron sees the future in Stem, Grey says he sees ten people on the unemployment line. Eron seems a little miffed that he thinks it would only replace ten, to be honest, and this introduces the central societal conflict that underlies the story—what is the human cost of technological improvement? I’ve always said that all good science fiction is a way to talk about real societal concerns, and Upgrade is no different. More on that later, though.
On the way home from Eron’s luxurious underground bunker—I hesitate to call it a house—the car malfunctions, taking Grey and Asha to Grey’s old, crime-ridden neighborhood and proceeds to go full speed into a head-on collision, flipping the car (must be a descendant of Tesla’s Autopilot software). Now, as I’m sure you can imagine, being in a serious accident is already a bad day, but flipping and being stranded in a dangerous area makes things much worse. A car full of masked men arrives and things get much worse, very quickly. Grey is hurt and drags himself from the car, but only in time to watch one of the men pull his mask down and shoot Asha point blank, before shooting Grey in the neck, severing his spine and leaving him a quadriplegic, helpless as he watches his wife die. It’s a horrifying prospect; shocking random violence, with no rhyme or reason, that strikes in the middle of a happy moment. Tearing away the person whom you hold most dear, in an irreversible act of cruelty; it’s as unthinkable as it is, sadly, commonplace. I think it’s part of the reason revenge thrillers are such an easy sell. We want to know that when people face tragedy, there is a way to get justice, even if the system fails to deliver it. In a world with an increasingly unreliable justice system, the idea of going outside of it becomes more and more palatable, and even more seemingly reasonable, despite the fact it’s probably a bad idea in reality. But it’s not reality, it’s the movies (let’s set aside the messages that entertainment media can and do send for the moment). So how exactly does a quadriplegic get revenge on hardened killers who gleefully murder for no reason?
Enter Stem. Eron explains to Grey that he can implant (or should I say install?) Stem into his spine to take over the functions that his body can no longer do; Stem can bridge the broken neural pathways and give him his body back. Grey is resistant at first, wanting to end things, but he eventually acquiesces and has the surgery in secret, because Stem is years away from the human testing phase. It’s after this that Stem starts talking to Grey, helping him analyze data that the police aren’t able to and giving him some leads on the killers. What ensues then is some top notch hand to hand action as Grey lets Stem take over and use its faster-than-human reflexes to start a campaign of revenge against the people who took everything from him. If you’re up for a great action movie that eschews the gun-fu of John Wick in favor of a more brutal approach, Upgrade delivers. It’s one of the things that helps it stand out from the crowd of Wick-likes and makes it a unique experience rather than a copycat. And it’s more than that. Just like John Wick stands above other movies that were similar and how every movie that feels like Die Hard doesn’t quite feel as good to watch as Die Hard, Upgrade has a few tricks up its sleeve to make it special.
I mentioned earlier about the underlying conflict of the greater world in Upgrade and while the movie isn’t always the most subtle in getting the point across, it does indeed have something to say about the world in which we live. Grey sees the human factor in everything; he’s not what I’d call a people person, but it’s clear that he’s empathetic to the struggles people face. Upon seeing some folks addicted to VR, he questions the wisdom of living in fake world instead of the real one. I’m assuming the VR in this near-future is more like OASIS from Ready Player One (a fun book with a movie adaptation I did not care for) and less like the nausea-inducing VR we have now, otherwise it wouldn’t be much of an escape. But the real one in Upgrade is pretty bleak—unlike the shiny post-scarcity, techno-utopia from Star Trek, this is a dark, gritty world, full of crime and poverty. I’ve written on the importance of escapism before, but it can be taken too far; if escaping the real world becomes your entire existence, it’s a problem. Technology is amazing, technology is what allows me to share these thoughts with you, and so many other things, but we’ve already reached a point where tech can seriously interfere with the rest of our lives. Upgrade shows a snapshot of a society in which tech and life are fully integrated and Grey is the outlier. The drones above can scan people for their cybernetic implants, the murderer has a gun implanted in his arm, you can be tracked by the technology you put into your body (much like our phones can be used to track us now). And the cost of all this progress is plain to see when the police have no leads on Asha’s murder and just don’t seem to care too much about it until other bodies start dropping. After all, it might have been the worst day of Grey’s life, but in this crime-ridden and poverty-stricken world, it’s just another Tuesday for the 5-0. Tech is being used to replace humans, AI is the new buzzword and the hot commodity, whether or not it works well, and it’s being used in the worst ways. Being used to replace creative jobs, writing terrible press releases, violating copyrights, replacing artists, used by high school students to write awful papers and avoid learning; we’re already seeing the human cost of technology. I have no solutions for you, unfortunately, I’m not delusional enough to think I can solve the world’s complex problems from this little blog, but it’s still important to talk about them. And Upgrade opens the door to conversation.
But like Attack the Block, you can let all the social commentary pass over you and Upgrade is still a great action film, made on a shoestring budget (a reported $5,000,000, which makes you wonder why garbage like Red One cost $250,000,000), that is genuinely fun to watch, has depth to the storytelling, and is well worth the 1 hour, 40 minute run time. It’s a compact movie with a lot to say and do and it doesn’t waste its time or yours. Available to stream on Netflix, I definitely recommend checking it out.
