Chappie review: Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, his mullet and a robot in an oddball film

Neill Blomkamp is, by far, the most interesting Hollywood director out there. Not only because he sets all his films outside America, but also because his reputation of being a talented filmmaker is always at stake. That’s the price a filmmaker pays for his first film being a movie geek favourite and a huge financial success. District 9 came out of nowhere and blew everyone out of the water. Elysium was a minor step down from District 9’s greatness, but still delivered the white-knuckle action. Blomkamp’s latest, Chappie, is an oddball — it will forever be remembered as the one that made people, for the first time, question Blomkamp’s actual talent.

Chappie isn’t a bad film. It’s actually very entertaining and a blast from start to finish. In Chappie, we get an actual attempt at a heart in a story that is a mixture of Robocop and the hilariously cheesy B-movie, Short Circuit. A robot police squad developed by a Google-like conglomerate enforces law in the near future. A scientist from the company (Dev Patel) develops a robot that is almost human. A thug couple (Die Antwoord members Ninja and Yolandi as themselves) are in need of quick money, so they steal the robot, name it Chappie and raise it as their child. They teach Chappie how to rob people.

That’s actually a story crazy enough to warrant some laughs, and you go in expecting a black comedy. To some extent, Chappie delivers precisely that. A robot child, raised by the worst parents on Earth, grows up to become a carjacker and is fooled by the parents into thinking that killing people actually means “putting them to sleep”. Chappie himself is really quirky, perpetually confused by the human need to be violent and selfish. “Why are you humans so violent?” Chappie asks repeatedly, while pummeling a human to the ground.

It’s certainly dark stuff and quite fun to watch, more so because of the digital effects and the incredible motion capture work by Sharlto Copley as the sweet natured but perpetually puzzled robot.

The moment Die Antwoord’s music plays at full volume to provide a soundtrack to Chappie stopping cars and hilariously stealing them, you realize the whole film should have been this way. Unfortunately, for most of its runtime, Chappie takes itself too seriously for its own good. That’s a problem because nothing in the film makes sense.

Hugh Jackman shows up as the villain with possibly the worst mullet ever seen on screen and an even worse motivation to kill Chappie. The scientist who built Chappie doesn’t think to replicate him with his own code and constantly asks Chappie to respect him because he’s the “creator”. Yolandi, who is present in the film for her ‘bad’ persona, suddenly becomes a doting mother at the sight of Chappie. Things just happen, for no reason, and the pileup of gaffes tumbles in a spectacular fashion in the end.

The bigger problem is that Blomkamp has made this movie twice before. Nearly every element of Chappie was present in either District 9, or Elysium, or both. The heavy handed allegory of the rich versus the poor, the mind transcending the body, the great divide (and similarities) between a human and a different non-human entity, the nonsensical villain with no clear motivation but destruction – sadly that’s all there is in Chappie. Blomkamp doesn’t say anything new. You expect more from the one believed to be the modern sci fi messiah.

There are a lot of things to enjoy in Chappie though, like the visuals for instance. Blomkamp really knows the hardware of action cinema. Every nut and bolt of every weapon is gorgeous. There are crazy designs to be found everywhere. Chappie himself is intricately engineered and one wishes the rest of the film were as lovably constructed as him.

Without Blomkamp’s burden of expectation, Chappie would have been a far more successful movie. The finished product is not bad at all; it’s just not District 9-level great. Someone pair Blomkamp with a better writer and maybe we’ll have a winner.