I’ll admit that my first thought upon seeing Upgraded, a new Amazon Prime romcom, was something close to excitement – finally, a leading role for Camila Mendes that’s not in high school. At 29, the Riverdale alum, so game for whatever batshit curveball that show threw her and so sharp in Netflix’s romp Do Revenge, is a veteran of commanding the screen as a bitchy, beautiful, secretly vulnerable teen queen. Upgraded, from actor turned director Carlson Young, offers Mendes the much-deserved chance to act her age – or, at least, a scrappy third-tier assistant old enough to have a master’s degree in art history, who gets in way over her head and also charms everyone around her.
Like many a teen-show-to-feature upgrade before it, Upgraded is the type of movie that would have been a mid-budget studio bet in the 2000s and now goes straight to streaming, with an air of disposability and clear, better antecedents – most obviously, in this case, The Devil Wears Prada. Like Anne Hathaway’s Andi, Ana is an ambitious twentysomething in New York with limited funds and serious aspirations, stuck doing unserious work in the name of luxury. An expert on fine art, she’s in a training program for an upscale auction house and trying to catch a break, lest she run out of money and be forced to, as she says, return to Tampa and sell paintings of boats to senior citizens. She’s an unwelcome futon crasher in the one-bedroom apartment shared by her sister Vivian (Aimee Carrero) and fiance Ronnie (Andrew Schulz), two people who speak loudly and don’t understand art, because working class.
