Thankfully, viewers with a hearty stomach and a taste for blood will be delighted to learn that Whannell delivers other things in abundance, like sickening violence, a Dr. Frankenstein-like computer scientist, a bar that's decorated with as many bones (human and animal) as Leatherface's den in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2," and a mystery sub-plot whose clues are all instantly ferreted out by "Stem" (Simon Maiden), a devil-on-your-shoulder version of KITT from "Knight Rider" who lives inside Grey's post-accident head. You'll have a good time with "Upgrade" if you don't take Whannell's half-baked ideas or unabashed blood-lust too seriously.
"Upgrade" begins by tacking on a scifi gloss to an otherwise paint-by-numbers revenge story. Grey and his wife Asha (Melanie Vellajo) are ambushed by the above-mentioned cyborgs while their self-driving car delivers them to their seemingly fully computerized home. Grey and Asha's car is hacked and destroyed during an unexpected stopover in the poverty row suburb where Grey grew up (he and Asha don't notice something's up because they're too busy making out in the backseat). But Grey's house is just as plush and stylistically confusing as the pseudo-basic man cave that their car is driving them away from: the subterranean lair of pouty super-scientist Eron (Harrison Gilbertson), whose futuristic man-cave's foundation is built out of concrete, granite, wood and glass, but is also filled with the same softly-hissing automated doors, voice-command-activated appliances, and touch-screen table-tops as Grey and Asha's house. The rich do live differently in "Upgrade," but Grey is tentatively identified as an outsider since he works with his hands and has a manly, face-assimilating beard that reduces his facial expressions to a gaping mouth and bulging Muppet-sized eyes.
Grey's superficial man-of-the-people vibe ingratiates him to Eron, a creepy loner genius whose vibe is essentially "the soul of Colin Clive in 'Frankenstein' but in the body of a bad James Dean lookalike." So Eron offers to help Grey after evil cyborgs kill Asha (not a spoiler, it happens early on!) and turn Grey into a quadriplegic: Eron will implant a radical computer chip named Stem inside his Grey's body, thereby helping the crippled mechanic regain control over his body's basic motor functions. Unfortunately for Grey, Eron doesn't immediately describe some of Stem's key features, including his sentience--Stem talks to Grey with a dispassionate robo-voice, like HAL 9000's low-budget under-study, HAL 350--and his ability to commandeer and even boost Grey's control over his body--whenever Grey gives Stem permission to do so. Stem naturally uses these super-human abilities to help Grey find his wife's killers.
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