I was really excited to watch this movie, and then I did, and it was just awful.

In a dystopian future a man and his wife get jumped by a group of men who end up killing the wife and permanently disabling the man.

The man is confined to a wheelchair with little to no movement in his body until he meets a man who says that he has a chip that can be inserted into his spine to help him move again.

So of course the main character takes up this chance at regaining his life, and through lots of gruesome scenes of surgery, which is a bit over the top, we see him being able to do things again. To move, to walk, to pick things up, everything that he had lost. With this new power he decides to find out who the attackers were.

This is when things get a bit strange and it turns out that the chip in his spine actually has its own consciousness and is able to take control of the man’s limbs autonomously. There is a scene where he has hunted down one of the attackers and the attacker will not talk, so the chip takes over this man’s body, because the man cannot do it, and slices his face up to make him talk…that’s where I kind of fell off.

Watching this man run on a treadmill while keeping his entire torso and upper body still and only his legs moving was the weirdest thing I have ever seen. This movie was so weird and so strange, it looked dumb whenever the chip in his spine would take over because he became so robotic but so unnaturally robotic. If I saw that coming towards me at night I would just laugh because it looked so bad.

And the fact of where the story went and how it ended was just such a non-ending, it was almost like it was trying to become The Terminator but failing in every way. I had no attachment to this man or his wife, I had no care about who these people were, and then there was a moment right at the end where they tease that it could’ve been all a dream, and I nearly shut it off then.

It just wasn’t my sort of movie to enjoy. I was really enticed by the synopsis of the whole thing but then actually seeing execution just seemed so jagged and weird and hard to follow. I had no care for these characters, I didn’t find what was happening very interesting, and the way in which everything was portrayed just fell so flat. It was one of those movies that was just an all-round disappointment.

For those reasons I would not recommend it. I would never watch this movie again and I can see why it was taken off Netflix when it was. It’s a shame because the idea was great, the execution was terrible, and I’m sure there’s plenty of better movies out there with the exact same synopsis so go watch them instead.

What do you think of Upgrade?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding