District 9 director Neill Blomkamp could very well have another good movie in him. Maybe it'll be the upcoming installment of the Alien franchise he nabbed thanks to Instagram, but one thing's for sure: It isn't Chappie, the robot-learns-to-feel drama-cum-action movie he adapted from a two-minute short he made over a decade ago. Messy and maddening, Chappie, which is now in theaters, is filled with utterly bewildering choices. Here are five of the worst.
1. Rap-rave group Die Antwoord plays a major role.
Ninja and Yolandi Visser (better known as Die Antwoord) are the human stars of Chappie — more than Hugh Jackman, more than Sigourney Weaver, and on par with Dev Patel, who plays the creator of the eponymous robot. The high-concept, performance-art-as-alt-hip-hop group appears as fictionalized versions of their stage personas, and their music's embedded throughout Chappie, which rolls credits over "Enter The Ninja." Ninja and Visser's distinctive looks (the tats, the hair, the eyebrows, etc.) and general theatricality have caught the eye of filmmakers before — David Fincher considered casting Visser as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, while Blomkamp, who is also South African, wanted Ninja for the Matt Damon role in Elysium.
But the pair, playing dim bulb gangsters living in a hipster lair in Soweto, torpedo the movie whenever they're on screen. Their cartoonish swagger and homage to/parody and appropriation of a particular slice of lower class South African subculture may work within the context of their act, but it doesn't at all match the earnestness of the rest of the movie. There's no way to take them seriously, as criminals or as surrogate parents to Chappie, whether reading him picture books or teaching him how to walk like a gangster. It's not unlike watching a gritty serial killer movie in which the baddies are revealed to be Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope from Insane Clown Posse. By the time Ninja gets around to decking out Chappie in spray paint and gold chains ("I've got blings!" the robot exclaims), it's impossible to tell, or care, what's meant to be in air quotes.
2. Chappie is about as lovable as Jar Jar Binks.
Chappie, performed by District 9 star Sharlto Copley, exists in a near future in which South Africa's crime is so bad that Tetra Vaal, a weapons company run by Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver), has made a name for itself manufacturing drones to assist human police. The drones, called "scouts," are functional, personality-free, and run on their own practical programming, but when one's slated for recycling after a particularly rough day on the job, Tetra Vaal's lead designer Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) scoops it up for use in an off-the-books experiment involving true artificial intelligence. Chappie — who's given that unfortunate moniker by Yolandi, to Deon's displeasure — is born a blank slate, like an infant, and yet it takes him just a few days to learn to be the world's most irritating robot. He imprints on Yolandi and Ninja, who've stolen him for help in a heist, and calls them "mommy" and "daddy." Using his greater than human intelligence, he picks up English in almost no time, and yet still likes to sometimes talk about himself in the third person ("Chappie doesn't want!").
Caught up in the mixed messages coming from the gangsters who've adopted him and the creator still trying to teach him, Chappie eventually gets moody, like a sulky, baby-talking teenager. He's an AI inhabiting a body built for function, so most of his expressiveness comes from his eyes — which occasionally, inexplicably change like he's an emoticon — and through the antenna-things that lower and perk up like a dog's ears. Characters like WALL-E and Baymax (who beat Chappie to the adorable robot fist bump) have shown how emotive seemingly simple designs can be, but Chappie is never anything more than garbled — which is dire when he's meant to be the emotional heart of the movie.
3. Even the supposedly smart characters act insanely dumb.
When Deon tells Michelle that he's invented possibly paradigm-altering AI that he'd like to test for free on a scout that would otherwise be destroyed, she says no, because it'd be too much paperwork with the insurance. When Deon, an apparently deeply ethical fellow who loathes the idea of Chappie getting involved in crime, invents what he believes to be technology with massive implications, he has no hesitations about turning it over to an organization whose main business is making weapons. When Deon is kidnapped by would-be gangsters who want a way to "turn off" the police drones, he trades them his groundbreaking new AI experiment instead, then leaves it with them, along with the key needed to program the drones — alerting neither Tetra Vaal nor the police, with no clear plan on how to retrieve Chappie himself. When Deon's co-worker Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman), a mulleted, aggro, former military type whose own robotics project has been overlooked, smashes Deon's face against his desk and pulls a gun on him in the middle of the office, no one reacts, tries to help, or report what happens.
And because Chappie is, like District 9, set in a gritty, recognizable future populated by characters who aren't far removed from where we are now, these contrivances look more glaring. Yet Deon makes a huge leap forward in artificial intelligence, leaves his creation in the care of street thugs, then comes back to encourage him to...write poetry.
4. The movie is largely a metaphor for parenting.
Chappie's grand declaration in the trailer — "I am consciousness. I am alive. I am Chappie" — suggests a story about the greater questions of existence and what it means for a robot to have emotions. But the major philosophical conflict in Chappie turns out, surreally, to be one of parenting. Despite the urgency of the gangsters' own situation, Yolandi tries to mother Chappie, encouraging him and reading to him in bed at night, while, like a stereotypical demanding father, Ninja worries the robot isn't macho enough. He takes Chappie out for lessons in how to walk cool and how to use throwing stars (the robot refuses to use a gun), and dumps him in a rough area to force Chappie to make his own way home, a move even he can't really explain.
Meanwhile, Deon, like a frustrated guidance counselor, visits to tell his creation, "You mustn't engage in these people's lifestyle choices," and, "Anything you want to do in your life, you can do," which is a weird and fundamentally untrue thing to say to a robot. He tries to keep Chappie on the straight and narrow, encouraging him to paint, pleading, "Don't let these philistines destroy your creativity," and watching in dismay as he cruises by in a stolen car. These are the elements of an odd but potentially interesting other movie that isn't set against a jarringly urgent backdrop of urban warfare and corporate sabotage.
5. There are no implications to the movie's robotic police force.
The most maddening thing about Chappie, more than the fact that it's about a robot that declares itself "gangsta number one," is that it introduces such a provocative underlying idea and then doesn't engage with it. Tetra Vaal's scouts are fully armed members of the police force — we see them armed and shooting during a raid of another gangster's lair. Chappie's police droids are apparently allowed to kill, and on the basis of programming that's less advanced than that of the movie's childlike hero.
South Africa has essentially also had the greatest effect in Blomkamp's filmmaking arsenal — it's a setting that excitingly defies old sci-fi conventions and expectations, in terms of its look, its history, and its makeup. The allegorical heft of District 9 came from the resonances the alien camp of its title had with apartheid-era details, and the private military company involved in its story worked its own merciless agenda. Chappie uses the same elements as set dressing — its main characters could have all stepped in from other movies — but its version of South Africa doesn't seem all that stable. Whenever Chappie or the other scouts are vulnerable, people throw things at them, attack them, set them on fire. Chappie hints, whether it intends to or not, that its population is being held down by the robotically enhanced police force along with the crime rate. It also insinuates that people are poised to explode when they're given a chance. Beyond all of the aspects of artificial intelligence Chappie doesn't get around to exploring, the fact that it suggests a troubled reality and then shrugs it off for soft-eyed faux family drama is the most bothersome.