UPGRADED (2024): Perhaps Not a First-Class Rom-Com, But Still Worth Flying Its Friendly Skies

Generally speaking, when a rom-com opens with a voiceover of someone expounding upon the merits of some esoteric piece of art, it’s waving a red flag of pretension and posturing; it wants you to know it’s not going to be one of those mindless rom-coms. While Upgraded (2024) definitely isn’t the exception that proves the rule, it’s at least grounded in the comfortingly familiar formula and buoyed by the charming performances of Marisa Tomei and Camila Mendes, and I think you could get away with allowing yourself to mostly float through a viewing without too many brain bumps or eyeball bruises. That said, buckle up your seatbelts because I have some notes about several aspects, including the plot, the way they grossly misuse Saoirse-Monica Jackson, the ending, and the depiction of women. Minor details, really.

We do indeed begin our journey with the camera closing in on an abstract painting by Hilma af Klint while a woman’s voice exhorts us to really, really look at. To consider how the artist “wanted to evoke the feeling of contradiction.” And how “some say the vertical line breaking the canvas symbolizes where opposite forces meet, the union necessary for creation. The dualities of lightness and darkness. The masculine and feminine…” You get the point. The speaker has some, presumably knowledgeable, shit to say about art.

Then, just as the music swells to a gentle crescendo and the speaker is about to express how the painting makes her feel, the scene cuts to a close-up of a guy wearing a blue plaid bathrobe, white tank top, and gold chains who asks what the fuck she’s talking about. (He gives off some very Honeymooners cosplay vibes.) It turns out that Ana Santos (Camila Mendes), who has big dreams of someday opening her own gallery, is currently sleeping on the futon and wearing out her welcome at her sister Vivian’s (Aimee Carrero) and her financé Ronnie’s (Andrew Schulz) small one-bedroom-ish apartment. The painting she’s been talking about is actually a very small print of the original that she hung on their wall (without asking) “to bring culture” into their house while she works her way through the training program at Erwins, one of the premier art auction houses in the city under the direction of the formidable and intimidating Claire Dupont (Marisa Tomei). Ronnie doesn’t care about any of this and just thinks she should consider moving back to Florida and joining the Navy so he can have sex with Vivian whenever he wants again. Charming joke, I’m sure. 

On her way to work Ana checks her account balance, which is almost nothing, rides in a subway car with a terrifying clown whom she doesn’t acknowledge, which I’m sure is some inside joke, and gets a small amount of a brown drink spilled on the hem of her white skirt by a woman still dressed up from the night before, which will turn out to be a Very Big Deal. At the office she meets up with her friend Amy (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), who notices the stain and goes into full-panic mode saying, “it’s not like we work for a sociopathic perfectionist or anything.” Let me just pause for a moment here to say that this movie should be sued for gross negligence for how they underuse Saoirse-Monica Jackson (Derry Girls). That woman could wring funny from almost anything, but the material she’s given here is so parched and dry that there’s nothing to be done with it.

Anyhoodle, flanked by her two willowy assistants Suzette (Rachel Matthews) and Renee (Fola Evans-Akingbola), Claire comes striding into the office, talking about how today is a Very Big Auction with Important Clients and she will not permit imperfections in her staff. After Claire personally inspects the line-up, her assistants delight in culling the lesser (and less beautiful) mortals to shunt them into less visible positions for the day.

It seems that Ana and her teeny-tiny stain have escaped notice until they haven’t and she and Amy are relegated to handing out programs at the door. The sadness! But then, when perusing the catalog, Ana spots an egregious error, pushes her way past Claire’s spike-heeled guardians of power, and alerts Claire in the nick of time, effectively saving the day and earning a very rare compliment from Claire for “doing the bare minimum this job requires.” Obviously, Ana goes out with her friends to celebrate and gets extremely drunk, only to be awoken early the next morning by a phone call from Claire (as if this woman would call someone as lowly as Ana directly) telling her she’s to leave that day for London to work as her third assistant. Ana scrambles to pack her suitcase and rushes to the airport, only to discover that Suzette and Renee have booked her on a later flight, but made her come early so she could schlepp all of Claire’s heavy luggage. They also make a point of telling her that they’ve booked her in economy instead of first class like them, because they want to make sure she knows her place. Overhearing this and their barbed comments toward her, the ticketing agent upgrades Ana’s ticket to first class on the spot, which is perhaps the most fantastical part of the entire movie. No, perhaps the most fantastical part is when Ana turns around and yells this fact out to all the people waiting in line behind her and she’s not immediately verbally assaulted. By the way, if you’re enjoying this mean stepsister schtick to Ana’s Cinderella, then stay tuned because there is so much more to come. If not, well brace your eyeballs, gird your loins, and all that jazz, because we’ve still got an hour and half of mean girl shenanigans. 

While wandering around the first-class lounge in facemask and fluffy robe, Ana manages to spill her Bloody Mary all over some well-dressed guy’s suede shoes. She offers to buy him new ones, but he demurs and is whisked away by the attendant before she can say more. But you obviously know that this guy is going to end up seated next to her in first class, that he will be handsome, and that they will spend the flight chatting and flirting. She, of course, mistakenly makes it sound like she’s the New York director of the auction house and then doesn’t correct the error, because this is just a guy on a plane, right? He turns out to be William (Archie Renaux), who has been in New York interviewing for a job in advertising, but is headed home to London to celebrate his mother’s birthday. The pair mostly have enough pretty people chemistry—their individual glows obscure their lack of mutual fizz—to make their flirting and dabbling in dating work, though the writing around their relationship is sometimes ragged and weighs down the whole affair. But I’m getting ahead of the story. They eventually land in London, and just when Ana realizes she doesn’t have enough money to pay for a taxi to the fancypants hotel where Claire is staying, William swoops in to offer her a ride. It turns out the hotel is mere blocks from his mother’s house. In the chauffeured car she chats with his mother Catherine (Lena Olin), an actress famous in the UK, who immediately wants to keep Ana in her pocket and invite her to everything. 

Soon enough, Ana is juggling being the lowliest assistant, ground down however possible by the twin towers of mean, and swanning off to glitzy get-togethers with Catherine, William, and their extremely wealthy cohort. She has to stay in a terrible hotel while keeping up the charade to William and his mother that she’s staying in the ultra-swanky one. She will be relegated to the basement office, but still get her work done efficiently and thoroughly. Plus, through her connections with William, she will score Claire the Shakespeare tickets she so desperately wants and Suzette cannot procure. She meets Julian Marx (Anthony Head), an artist who faked his death in order to up the value of his work and, with her open and frank assessment of his work, charms her way into his heart. She will see Catherine’s exquisite collection of art, which just so happens to be the exact same very hush-hush collection that Erwins is bringing to auction soon. This whole situation will obviously eventually blow up in her face. She watches William coach a youth soccer team, which is largely so that we know that although he may be incredibly rich, he is also a man of the people without any airs or expectations. I mean, sure, he flies only first class, goes to upper crust parties, works for a high-end company, and lives what appears to be a pretty rarified life, but he definitely would have fallen for Ana even if she hadn’t lied about her work. How dare you even question it!

Like I said, I think you can let a lot of this movie kind of float by in a haze of pretty faces and colors and the general shape of a rom-com and it will be a fine enough watch, but it’s also too long and it starts to sag under the weight of so much extra filler. They wait until pretty late in the game to give Claire’s character more depth and strength beyond stalking and scary, which is too bad, really, because she’s far more interesting when she’s thundering and nuanced, driven and ethical, iron-willed and encouraging. The twin flames of snipe never really get that treatment, so they are left as mean meanies who are ultimately most concerned that Ana not usurp their positions of power within the organization. It’s a tired, worn out, boring kind of trope to paint on women, especially without any kind of depth or background to ground it. If you’re going to make women villainous, then make them interesting as well. Vapid mean girls went out of style a long time ago, and we’re not bringing them back ever again because the whole stereotype is sexist. And then there is Ana herself, who lies the big lie in pursuit of feeling like someone, which is wrong, but then the movie rewards her by allowing her to become exactly what she wanted to become, so the message is that if you lie the big lie, but your heart is pure when you do it, then you might just come out on top anyway? I don’t know, folks, that’s awfully confusing. What’s also awfully confusing is the end of this movie, which does not stick the landing one bit. It feels so anticlimactic and lackluster that I almost (almost!) missed the opening art analysis.

Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:

Return to Top