Upgrade

Not many people have heard of this movie, and that is too bad.  This is a well done little gem, one that in bygone days would have been called a B movie. Think of a cross between Death Wish and Altered Carbon and throw in a little West World and Ex Machina and you have Upgrade.  Set in a near future society where most people have self-driving cars and classy tech, Grey Trace ( played by Logan Marshall-Green) is a throwback to a simpler time.  He restores vintage cars and sells them to bored rich people.  One of those rich people is a tech company honcho who shows Grey and his wife a special new gizmo that will ‘change everything’.  After their visit, something goes wrong while they are traveling home – his wife is murdered and he is paralyzed from the neck down.  Luckily for Grey, the billionare tech master and inventer has an experimental cure called STEM that can repair his body with an upgrade.  This upgrade leaves Grey with almost super-human strength, reactions, and agility.  But…and it’s a big but, STEM also has a personallity of his own.  With STEM’s guidance, Grey now has the ability to find his wife’s murderers and seek justice, or peprhaps it is just revenge.  Either way, things do not go as planned and there are several twists.  This taut thirller is well written and acted and even throws in a little humor. Do not take kids to see this though as the R rating is certainly justified and I found myself closing my eyes at some of the violence.  But all in all it remains an intriguing movie — a good summer popcorn movie to see in-between the super hero movies.