Chappie
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Writer: Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver, Brandon Auret
Seen on: 13.3.2015

Plot:
The robot police force has been rather well established in South Africa and the company producing and maintaining them, headed by Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver), is extremely successful. But not all engineers are quite satisfied yet. Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) dreams of building an AI and trying it on one of the robots, while Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman) is convinced that his robots – that are more like war machines – are the future. Then Deon gets his hands on a discarded robot and installs his AI, creating Chappie (Sharlto Copley). But Chappie gets promptly stolen by Ninja (Ninja), Yolandi (Yo-Landi Visser) and Yankie (Jose Pablo Cantillo) who bring him up as a gangster like themselves.

Good grief, Chappie was bad. I barely have the words to express just how bad. [And I just realized that I’ve written almost the same thing about Elysium already.] I have yet to see a Blomkamp film that works for me, but Chappie is certainly the worst of the bunch.

The movie does have a few things that are not that bad. Hugh Jackman (and his mullet) gives us certainly one of the weirdest villains in recent memory. He never becomes really scary, but as comedy, this was pure gold. Dev Patel does what he can with the flat character he’s given, as does Sigourney Weaver. And Sharlto Copley and his voice acting were really great – he actually manages to wrangle actual emotions from even the scenes that are as subtle as a sledgehammer. (Come to think of it, the entire film never manages more subtlety than that.)

But the rest of the film is a mess. The plot is a mess. The dialogues are a mess. The pacing is the biggest mess of all. And then you get such extra nice bits like Yolandi immediately taking on the mother role to Chappie, probably just because she’s a woman. And the strong anti-religious streak that won’t quite fit with the rest of the film.

Most disturbingly though, I’ve now seen three of Blomkamp’s films, two of which are set in South Africa and one in LA, and in not a single one of them is there a black person shown in a positive light/speaking role, if they are shown at all. In this one we get a latino and an Indian guy in South Africa, and a white villain styled like a stereotypical black gangster (Brandon Auret), but we don’t actually get any black people at all. WHAT THE EVERFUCKING HELL?

I just had to cringe so much during the entirety of the film and there was not a single thing that I enjoyed without reserve. It didn’t take long until I wished for the film to just get to the end. But that was before I knew how the film would end because that was probably the worst, most stupid bit of it all. In fact, the entire film drowned in stupidity and I hated it. That’s pretty much all there is to say.

Summarizing: Ugh.