Upgrade
Upgrade can byte my pale, fleshy ass! I didn't like it, not one little bit. It's a teraflop! It tries to RAM its piston-powered mecha-peener up our asses, but I'd take the bleedingest vag of a ROM-com over it any day.
With a toolshed full of Saws, an insidious number of Insidiouses and grapes-and-bananas bunches of other moneymaking scripts under his belt, you'd think that writer - and in this case director - "Viven" Leigh Whannel could've done better than "a less goth cyber-Crow" as the pitch, premise and punk-ass punchline of Upgrade.
In this sci-fi/action/horror mashup set in the near future, a quadriplegically paralyzed Luddite, Grey (Logan "Penny" Marshall-Green), gets a high-tech implant that lets him walk and wank again. The implant, called STEM, is courtesy of a mysterious tech billionaire who doesn't cotton to the FDA trying to get all up in his shit. Grey uses his newfound powers of being able to wipe his own ass to search for the guys who killed his wife and turned him into a human Lincoln Log.
Left to his own devices, the feckless cunt Grey wouldn't make it past the first, expendable bad guy. Lucky for him, STEM turns out to be a super advanced AI that knows everything and can do anything. When Grey gets in trouble, which is from moment fucking one, he just lets STEM drive his body, and suddenly he's Chuck Norris. Minus the bitchin' beard.
The bad guys turn out to be halfway to cyborgs themselves. They all have guns built into their arms. Which means they have the right to bear arms in their bare arms. All of that somehow plays into Upgrade's "plot" and "twist," both of which will have even the dumbest of fucks feeling like a Kurzweil-style genius.
Which is a particularly cruel joke, because when those same lug nuts rave about Upgrade to anyone not raised on a lead paint diet, the helium filling their egos is going to turn into radon right quick. Upgrade is so full of trash logic that if you think about it for even a microsecond it falls apart faster than Roseanne Barr's career.
June 1, 2018