Upgrade review – injured man gets reboot in nifty, nasty cyber thriller

The hero of Leigh Whannell’s exhilarating and visceral film is quadriplegic by day but a software-powered avenger by nightThe latest sneak attack from genre kings Blumhouse is an unusually patient, detailed and visceral cyber-thriller that plays like a Black Mirror rethink of The Six Billion Dollar Man, and may be the closest any mainstream production is likely to get to Japan’s cult Tetsuo movies.

Left embittered after a carjacking that kills his beloved and puts him in a wheelchair, petrolhead Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) enters into a confidential pact with a reclusive, ominously peroxided tech genius, becoming the guinea pig for what’s dubbed “biomechanical fusion”: a microchipping operation that reboots his broken body with a Hal-like operating system and heightened physical capabilities.

Does it endow Grey with renewed peace? Big nope.Stepping up as writer-director, fiendish Saw scribe Leigh Whannell restores those sharp and spiky edges

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