Review #883: 'Chappie' (2015)

Ever since South African director Neill Blomkamp's breakthrough District 9 (2009), great things have been expected. Although I personally believe his debut to be somewhat overrated, paying homage to great sci-fi movies perhaps once too often, it was certainly a breath of fresh air with it's parable of apartheid South Africa and its unconventional anti-hero. His follow-up, 2013's Elysium, was underwhelming, but it was making a point somewhere amidst it's kinky cybernetics and gaping plot-holes. His latest, Chappie, is an improvement, but Blomkamp again fails to live up to wunderkind label.

Set in a near-future Johannesburg, the streets are policed by a super-efficient robot force, causing crime rates to plunge and sending criminals scampering whenever they rear their metallic faces. Created by the not-so-shady corporation Tetravaal, headed by an underused Sigourney Weaver, employee and engineering prodigy Deon (Dev Patel) manages to create artificial intelligence and steals a damaged robot headed for the scrap heap to experiment with. However, on his way home he is kidnapped by a group of local gangsters - Ninja, Yo-Landi and Yankie (The Walking Dead's Jose Pablo Cantillo) - who force Deon to programme the droid to help them with a heist that will pay-off a angry kingpin.

And so Chappie is born; a robot who must learn everything like a child, albeit at a far advanced speed, and who not only possesses the ability to think and talk, but to create. Yo-Landi plays the role of mother, encouraging Chappie to express himself with art, but Ninja wants to turn him into the ultimate gangster - pimp-roll, bling and casual nose-wipe to end sentences included. But fellow Tetravaal employee Vincent (Hugh Jackman), an ex-solider jealous of Deon's accomplishments, has other ideas, attempting to sabotage Chappie at every turn in order to get his own inferior hulking droid greenlit by the company and sent out into the streets.

Chappie received an unfair panning from the critics and underperformed at the box-office. Yet there's plenty to be enjoyed in the film's occasional eccentric streaks, namely in the casting of Ninja and Yo-Landi, members of South African rap group Die Antwoord. They can't act for shit, but are at least an interesting alternative to the usual science-fiction stock characters, helping make their ridiculous persona's somewhat likeable. Chappie himself, played by Blomkamp regular Sharlto Copley in motion-capture, has been compared to Jar-Jar Binks in some reviews and comments I've read. While he is sometimes slightly grating, his childish naivety is endearing, and invites sympathy when he is routinely abused and manipulated by the few people around him.

Yet Blomkamp seems to struggle with coming up with an original narrative. His films always seem to end up with the hero facing off against some one-note and extremely angry bad guy, pumped up by machinery or a big-ass weapon, and its no different here. It feels like Jackman's character was thrown into the mix for no other reason than to give Chappie a nemesis. Jackman himself, demonstrating one of cinema's all-time horrendous mullets, doesn't convince either. The privatisation of the police and the positive and negatives of tampering with A.I., as well as the struggles of parenthood, are crammed in and rushed over without really answering any of the many questions it poses. As a piece of entertainment, it provides all the thrills and spills required, but any deeper meditations tend to fall flat.


Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Starring: Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver
Country: USA/Mexico

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie