Metacritic reviews

Whannell strikes out on his own with his first truly original concept as a writer-director...in a film whose production is as ambitious as its story is formulaic. Thankfully, the former mostly compensates for the latter, making Upgrade a genre-bending summer treat for those who don’t mind a little (okay, a lot) of blood with their popcorn.

Upgrade’s sheer energy and the strength of its concept do more than enough to elevate this revenge picture into something refreshing and eminently watchable.

Upgrade, Whannell’s second outing behind the camera, is yet another top-notch repair job, this time a kinetic sci-fi riff fashioned from scrap metal and human entrails, nervily updating Cronenbergian body horror for the iOS era.

Upgrade is a brutish, efficient and well-executed slice of cyberpunk action horror with a silly streak.

Upgrade offers memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.

Infusing its familiar dystopian sci-fi tropes with stylishly gonzo, low-budget filmmaking and inventive narrative flourishes, Upgrade proves far more entertaining than it has a right to be.

Upgrade is most effective when mining the comical and bizarre love-hate chemistry between Grey and Stem and pairing that singular conflict with batshit-crazy action, but the film’s follow-through is clunky and unfulfilling.

At the end of the day, it’s the action equivalent of a secondhand musical – you’ll most likely come for the dance scenes, and they’re good enough to wade through the filler.

If this vaguely cyberpunk, occasionally comic Australian flick were named after its own qualities, it would have been called “Knockoff.”

As a movie, it’s the cinematic equivalent of paint-by-numbers: competent, attractive even, but take a single step closer and the lines peek through. There’s no need to pay money to go see Upgrade: If you select it on a plane and sleep through 60% of it, you’ve seen it in its entirety.