Chappie

While Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie is not a good movie by any measure I would use, neither is it the abomination it has been painted as. It’s noisy, bloated, confused, derivative, singularly lacking in point and occasionally obnoxious. But at worst, it’s just a forgettable mediocrity — not some kind of crime against humanity. When I say it’s lacking in point, I don’t mean that I begrudge it not really being about something (though I suspect Blomkamp thinks this is). It is not necessary that a movie have some lofty message or explore deep themes to be good — sometimes even great. The point I’m missing here is another one. I spent most of the film wondering, “Why are you telling me this?” The story didn’t strike me as compelling — or even all that interesting.

However you dress up the movie, it really is a clunky mashup of Short Circuit (1986) and RoboCop (1987) — with large dollops of Mr. Dickens’ Oliver Twist thrown in. (Consider that our orphaned robot falls in with criminals and is trained to be a thief — and there’s more.) Oh, sure, it has more violent action scenes than its models, but to deny their presence is pretty hopeless. This is not to say that Blomkamp doesn’t add some things to this mix, but the question arises as to whether these additions are good ideas. Offhand, I’d say no.

We may fairly conclude that Blomkamp is a fan of the South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord — and he is determined to share that enthusiasm with us. As a result, he has cast the group’s frontman, Ninja, as the more-or-less main bad guy — named, uh, Ninja, a kind of cross between Dickens’ Fagin and Bill Sikes. Then we have Die Antwoord’s Yo-Landi Vi$$er as Ninja’s girlfriend, Yolandi (invention is not the movie’s strong suit), who functions as Nancy, the confederate of Fagin and Sikes’ lover, whose maternal instincts are aroused by Oliver. (Of course, here Oliver is Chappie the robot.) If you don’t know Die Antwoord, you will have a pretty good handle on them by the end of the film. Not only are Ninja and Vi$$er in the film, but they wear shirts advertising the group, have a Vi$$er doll and their music blares on the soundtrack. It’s like some weird built-in Die Antwoord promotional gambit. You will leave knowing who they are, but you may not feel enriched by this knowledge or be happy about it.

The plot is at once convoluted and simplistic to the point of sinking spells of stupidity. Almost nothing seems thought through. We’re supposed to believe that Deon (Dev Patel in a barely written role) came up with the robot cops on which an entire corporation is based but is assigned to a cubicle where evil and jealous Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman in a half-assed mullet) can glower at him? How and why — except for purposes of the plot — Moore is even employed is a mystery. Similarly mysterious is how he was allowed to build his warfare-class robot, the Moose (a knock-off of RoboCop‘s ED-209) — not to mention how no one thinks anything of Moore threatening Deon with a gun in an office full of co-workers. I suppose they’re just used to the fact that Moore is a bitter, unhinged fascist with some kind of weird religious scruples.

Mostly, of course, the movie is about Chappie (voiced by Blomkamp stalwart Sharlto Copley), the sentient robot of Deon’s dreams. Technically, Chappie is a marvel. I will not dispute this for a moment. I believed he was real and present in every frame, despite being a thing created from CGI and some motion-capture of Copley. He’s also whiny, grating and strangely unable to process ideas or English. We are supposed to be all kinds of sympathetic about him — and maybe you will be. I never cared about him in the least. He occasionally raises quasi-existential questions like, “Why did you make me so I would die?” But these — like all of the film’s other deep-dish ideas — go nowhere. Mostly, I found him annoying. When he beats the crap out a bad guy and gives him a talking to, I kept waiting for him for him to go full Shirley Temple and say, “I think you’re very, very mean!”

The bulk of the movie seems to exist for extremely violent action scenes in which much blood is shed and “stuff blows up neat.” I suppose these are handled with reasonable efficiency — if you care for this sort of thing. All in all, Blomkamp seems to be a victim of the inevitable (it seems) headlong rush to proclaim directors as “visionaries” far too early in their careers. District 9 (2009) at least flirted with greatness, but pinning that visionary label on the man both gave him too much freedom and put too much pressure on him to produce something “visionary” again, and so far that hasn’t really happened. And with Chappie he seems ever further from it. Rated R for violence, language and brief nudity.