Chappie Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Ninja, Yolandi Visser. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Rated R. Now playing.
When writer-director Neill Blomkamp debuted with the striking sci-fi thriller District 9 in 2009, it seemed like the emergence of a major new talent, one mentored by Peter Jackson and poised to bring original, thought-provoking genre storytelling to blockbuster movies. Now that Blomkamp has made two more features, however, that promise is pretty much all gone. While 2013’s Elysium was his unsuccessful jump to big-budget Hollywood filmmaking, the new Chappie finds Blomkamp returning to his native South Africa, working with his chosen collaborators on a small scale and still coming up with a movie that is inconsistent, overreaching and often preachy.
The title character is one of the police robots known as Scouts, which in the film’s future Johannesburg have been deployed to drastically reduce violent crime. Scientist Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), who created the Scouts, steals a robot marked for the junk heap and installs it with his new artificial intelligence program (helpfully labeled “consciousness.dat”). But when he’s kidnapped by a pair of low-level criminals (played by Ninja and Yolandi Visser of South African rap group Die Antwoord, using their own names and wearing their band’s own merchandise), Chappie ends up as an inadvertent experiment in conflicting parenting styles. The gangsters try to raise him to be a fellow criminal, while Deon wants his creation to become a selfless artist.
The awkward comedy of Chappie’s accelerated childhood combines with the sloppy thriller plotting, as Ninja and Yolandi try to come up with the money they need to pay off a local crime boss, while Deon’s angry co-worker Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman) uses threats and deceit to activate his own robot, a giant war machine that looks like a copy of ED-209 from RoboCop. A lot of things in Chappie look like a copy of RoboCop, from the corporatized police force to the rampant street crime to the colorful thugs with ridiculous haircuts. Chappie himself is more in line with Short Circuit’s Johnny Five, an ostensibly cute, childlike robot learning about the harshness of the world around him. The character (played via motion capture by Blomkamp’s go-to actor Sharlto Copley) is a marvel of visual effects, but he’s also incredibly annoying, a combination of a bratty toddler and a yappy little dog.
That’s too bad, because Chappie is really the only sympathetic character in the movie. Everyone else is either morally compromised or outright evil, not that their motivations make a ton of sense (Vincent in particular seems to just do whatever is needed for the plot to move forward). Patel generates a bit of sympathy for his well-intentioned but misguided scientist, but Ninja and Visser are terrible actors, and the conceit of having them self-promote within the movie (at one point Visser is wearing a Chappie T-shirt; where did her character get that?) is seriously distracting.
Blomkamp remains adept at staging action sequences, and some of the shootouts are exciting, even if there’s nobody to root for. The heavy-handed political commentary of Elysium is toned down here, but there are still plenty of preachy moments, especially when Deon and Ninja are at odds over Chappie’s upbringing. The movie’s climax goes completely off the deep end, turning into some sort of meditation on the nature of consciousness, but Blomkamp’s ideas remain completely superficial. As a visual stylist and a director of action, he displays real talent, but Chappie is the second movie in a row in which he fails at both social commentary and basic storytelling.
