Leigh Whannell’s low-budget horror feature Upgrade, now playing in general release, reminds me of the goofy genre mash-ups made by Brian De Palma in the 1960s and ’70s (Hi, Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise) and Takashi Miike in the 1990s and the aughts (Fudoh: The New Generation, The Happiness of the Katakuris). Whannell steals from so many different movies—and does it so cheerfully—that Upgrade stops feeling derivative and starts looking like a collage, with the recycled elements forming a new sensibility. Like the De Palma and Miike films, this one takes place in a self-aware cinematic world where taboos don’t exist and anything is possible, the writer-director hurling out narrative developments and sci-fi conceits.
The fight scenes in Upgrade suggest someone kicking ass at a video game such as Grand Theft Auto, the choreographed violence so precise that it becomes hypnotic and a little eerie. And for a while, the murders provide good, amoral fun—because a computer chip is doing all the work, Grey can remain a sympathetic, even pitiable hero. Yet like Monkey Shines, which dealt with a quadriplegic man and his homicidal service animal, the film asks whether the hero can really be innocent of murders committed by an entity with whom he shares a symbiotic relationship. One rarely finds such moral ambiguity in a popcorn movie. Whannell also mines his premise for topical commentary: Stem turning Grey into a killing machine is only a satirical exaggeration of how the Internet can bring out the worst in people.
Directed by Leigh Whannell. R, 95 min.
