There’s been talk of a romantic comedy renaissance, although I have to admit I haven’t focused on it enough to know if that’s true. But I’ve seen some good ones over the last few years, and some bad ones, too, and so at least anecdotally it seems like there has been an uptick in quantity. A judgment on quality is pending.
One that tips into the positive category, though, is called Upgraded, which has sharper edges and better comic timing than a lot of rom-coms, even if the romance part of the equation seems like an afterthought.
Camila Mendes stars as Ana, a low-level worker at an art auction house in New York. She impresses her boss by catching an egregious error in the nick of time, and so she’s asked to go to London to help with a major auction there. On the way, she meets William, a handsome and rich British lad, and she makes a very poor decision that sets everything in motion.
The film flags whenever it turns to the two lovebirds, nothing in those sections is anything but boilerplate, but it’s a whole lot more interesting when Ana is working and generally being pretty good at her job, even if, again, a bad decision has colored the whole situation. It’s quite funny, too, with humor that relies on misdirection and is secure enough that it doesn’t have to call attention to itself, sometimes even residing entirely in the background. The supporting cast helps a lot, too, with Marisa Tomei as Ana’s high-impact boss and Saoirse-Monica Jackson from Netflix’s Derry Girls as Ana’s best friend.
This is not the next movie I expected to see from director Carlson Young, whose first film, The Blazing World, was a hallucinatory fantasy that was ambitious, but not accomplished. Here, though, we couldn’t be more conventional, and we always feel like we’re in competent, capable hands. Upgraded is a surprisingly fun rom-com… although we didn’t really need the rom.
Upgraded is on Amazon Prime Video.
