Sometimes a movie will come around that serves as a reminder that a cool-sounding concept is not enough to carry a film. Sometimes that very same movie will even be kind enough to build up great expectations and then proceed to shatter all of them like a mean kid stomping on a toddler’s sand castle. For our purposes, let’s call this film Chappie.
Chappie, directed by Neill Blomkamp (the mastermind behind such films as District 9 and Elysium) epitomizes exactly why trailers and pre-release information ought to be viewed dubiously at best. Despite appearing to be a promising sell, Chappie ultimately fails to deliver anything above stunning mediocrity. Its story is lackluster, its atmosphere is dour and its characters range from wooden to ludicrous. Such failings are nothing new to Blomkamp’s films — both Elysium and District 9 suffered in similar manners — but one would have hoped that either he or audiences would have learned their lesson by now. Clearly neither is the case.
Chappie is a science fiction drama detailing the struggle of a budding artificial intelligence robot as it grows and begins to interact with the world. After successfully creating a fully automated robotic army to help combat crime, inventor Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) begins dabbling in creating a true, self-aware artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, as his boss has clearly seen the Terminator movies one too many times, Deon finds his progress in the project roadblocked on official channels and he is forced to bring the project underground.
Deon is unexpectedly kidnapped by a gang (played by Watkin Tudor Jones as Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser and Jose Pablo Cantillo) and is forced to turn over his new artificially intelligent robot to them. As the robot (named Chappie) awakens for the first time, it exhibits a truly innocent and childlike personality. However, it then falls to his adoptive gang “family” to determine how Chappie should be used and what kind of person he will become.
On its surface, Chappie appears to be a perfectly fine film. While questions surrounding artificial intelligence and what precisely separates humans from machines are by no means new to science fiction, Chappie presents them in an interesting way: Neither the robots nor the humans are (initially) presented as a wholly malevolent force. It’s neither a destructor story nor a pure loss-of-innocence story. Instead, it’s a story about what it means to be a person, even when the rest of the world doesn’t see you as such.
Or at least that’s what it could have been. Instead of offering a story exploring any of these questions in a compelling way, Chappie opts to create a world of black-and-grey morality, one-note characters and a plot so confused that it’s almost impossible to determine what exactly it’s even trying to accomplish. While none of these aspects are inherently bad on their own, when lumped together in this fashion, it simply makes for a muddled mess.
The biggest issue the film faces is that it absolutely refuses to explore any of the big questions it puts forth. Should a true artificial intelligence be created or not? Beyond two characters shouting at each other, this question is barely addressed. Should Chappie be used as a gang robot or raised like a proper child? Beyond two characters shouting at each other, this question is barely addressed.
It certainly doesn’t help that every character in the film is reduced to a single defining character trait: the eccentric inventor, the hardened gangster, the motherly figure — all stereotypes that audiences have seen before. Furthermore, not a single actor brings anything remotely new to the table with his or her performance.
The biggest offender here is Hugh Jackman who plays another inventor named Vincent Moore. While Jackman himself is a great actor capable of giving excellent performances, Vincent’s character is so bland and overused that it’s almost painful to watch Jackman stagger through his lines.
This character is every jealous, over-ambitious, evil-for-the-sake-of-evil archetype that has ever existed with none of the unique quirks that could make him actually interesting. To be fair, Ninja’s secondary antagonist character is absolutely no better, being nothing more than a generic, extorting bully. Between the pair of them, a story intended to question the nature of human consciousness devolves into a montage of criminals kicking around an infant. In effect, it’s not just uninteresting, but horribly mean-spirited.
As these characters and villains engineer their bland and generic conflicts with one another, Chappie himself sits in the middle of it all. To give credit where it is due, Chappie himself is very well-rendered, and Sharlto Copley does a fine job breathing life into the machine.
Perhaps intentionally it is genuinely heartbreaking to see the robot get kicked around, taken advantage of and otherwise abused by both the characters and the inane story. Unfortunately, neither the side characters nor the setting are fleshed out enough to make Chappie’s development interesting. With films like WALL-E on the market, which manage to elicit so much emotion through so little, it’s astounding that Chappie is barely able to elicit anything beyond pity.
At its core, Chappie is a bland, mean-spirited film about an innocent child getting bullied for the sake of posing existential questions. Don’t expect any answers to these questions, and outside of a few painfully engineered heartstring-tugging moments, don’t expect to feel any notable connection with any of the characters.
While there are admittedly much more objectively bad films on the market, Chappie unfortunately makes the grievous mistake of promising so much and delivering so little. If you’re looking to watch something even marginally well-fleshed-out this weekend, stick to the Saturday morning cartoons because you’ll have better luck.
Overall Rating: 2/5
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