Movie Review: “Chappie” (Rated R)

Sony / Columbia(NEW YORK) — My visceral reaction to writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie? I loved it!

My critical, discerning reaction to Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie? It’s got some issues.

Johannesburg, South Africa — Jo’burg, as it’s called here — is fraught with crime. Instead of solving the issue through better governance, education and extracurricular youth programs (which makes for boring sci-fi), the city becomes the first in the world to utilize a police force of gun-wielding law enforcement robots called Scouts. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this concept before.

If you’ve seen the trailer for Chappie, it immediately conjures up memories of RoboCop, The Terminator, Short Circuit, I, Robot, The Iron Giant, Wall-E, and Boyhood. Okay, I’m kidding about Boyhood, but from the start, Chappie clearly is a derivative movie that gives you that old “been there, done that” feeling. That is, until you sit down and watch it.

Sigourney Weaver plays Michelle Bradley, the head of the company that makes the Scouts. Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel (who can also be seen this weekend in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is Deon, the engineer who created the police robots and is on the verge of inventing a program that will turn them into sentient beings. At the same time, a mullet-wearing Hugh Jackman (brilliant. I mean the mullet, though Hugh’s excellent, too) is an ex-army officer who works for Bradley’s company and has developed his own crime-fighting robot, but his beast of a machine is remotely controlled by a person wearing a helmet that allows them to control the robot with his or her mind. 

Bradley isn’t keen on Deon’s breakthrough, but that’s not going to stop Deon. She isn’t keen on Hugh’s machine, either, but guess what? That’s also not going to stop Hugh.

Deon implants his artificial intelligence program into a damaged droid that was due to be destroyed.  That’s when both Deon and Chappie are kidnapped by a small group of “gangstas,” played by South African rap-punk-techno group Die Antwoord, who want Deon to deactivate the police robots so they can pull off a million-dollar heist to pay off a debt. This is where the seedy underbelly of Blomkamp’s Jo’burg rears its ugly, kinetic, gang-banging head. Deon wants to teach Chappie to be as human as possible — a doting father who wants to impart important life lessons to his child. His kidnappers have other plans.

Blomkamp has said he came up with the idea for Chappie while listening to Die Antwoord’s music. The duo, comprised of Yolandi Visser, a waifish, bleached-blonde Lady Gaga lookalike, and Ninja, a tatted-up, mostly shirtless, Vanilla Ice lookalike, informs the look and feel of this movie. The good news is, it infuses Chappie with a frenetic originality. The bad news:  Yolandi and Ninja, playing exaggerated versions of themselves, are terrible actors. Fun to watch, but terrible actors.

Sharlto Copley, however, is just the opposite.  The actor Blomkamp introduced to us in 2009’s District 9 plays Chappie in a tremendous motion-capture performance that elicits immediate empathy. It’s also a seamless motion-capture effect, perhaps more impressive than the last Planet of the Apes film, which was itself spectacular.

The inherent problem with Chappie, though, is that its philosophical themes about artificial intelligence and humanity get a bit lost in Blomkamp’s fondness for destruction. There’s also the issue of how derivative it is, as well as a continuity issue, when Blomkamp uses a storytelling device at the beginning of the movie that makes very little sense by the movie’s end.

Even with its faults, however, Chappie isn’t a bad movie. It’s visually jaw-dropping, and has enough
thrilling and emotional moments to likely win you over.

Three-and-a-half out of five stars.

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