Upgrade: Good clean gory fun of the genre-hopping variety

Review: A nifty bit of film-making trading on contemporary AI paranoia

Logan Marshall-Green in Upgrade
Logan Marshall-Green in Upgrade
Upgrade
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Director: Leigh Whannell
Cert: 16
Genre: Sci-Fi
Starring: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson
Running Time: 1 hr 40 mins

To paraphrase Alan Partridge, I've got genre pie all over my face. Stand back as the spine of Death Wish is grafted to the mind of Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey and performs the busting bullet time moves of The Matrix. Say hi to the most unabashedly limitless joint since, well, Limitless.

Blumhouse Tilt, for anyone who has missed it, is the multiplatform wing of the remarkable house that Jason Blum has built. No one is going to mistake the new film from Saw co-creator Leigh Whannell for this year's Get Out, but it's a nifty bit of film-making trading on contemporary AI paranoia and more generalised latent Luddite tendencies.

Logan Marshall-Green’s Grey Trace – even the names scream “genre” – makes for an excellent mark in this hot mess of whodunnit. A garage mechanic who works on muscle cars and listens to vinyl in a near future defined by self-driving vehicles and body enhancements, he is left quadriplegic in the same violent attack that kills his tech-sector wife. Returning home in a wheelchair after months in hospital, he accepts an offer from Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), a tech bro overlord, to reattach Grey’s spine using a state-of-the-art chip, a device that soon manifests as a voice in his head.

Together, Grey and doodah set about tracking down the men who killed his wife, using mad new computer-enhanced ninja skills. Get Out's Betty Gabriel is the cop who keeps calling around to ask why Grey's wheelchair keeps turning up at crime scenes.

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With minimal use of CG backdrops and futuristic props – no viewer would ever suspect this was made for about $4 million – Whannell elegantly establishes his world. There’s nothing else too elegant about the rest of the enterprise, which increasingly inclines toward the silly and ultraviolent as it goes along. Several scenes will remind you that this is from the same mind that devised Jigsaw’s reverse bear trap. Jed Palmer’s excellent 1980s-alike score would alone justify the admission price.  Good, clean, gory fun.

Tara Brady

Tara Brady

Tara Brady, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and film critic