Chappie: Movie Review

Writer/director Neill Blomkamp is back with his third big screen sci-fi flick “Chappie”. Although you won’t recognize the “District 9” star, Sharlto Copley is also back via motion-capture as the title character. “Chappie” is nowhere near as good as “District 9” but it is a whole lot more fun than Blomkamp’s previous effort “Elysium”.

Set in the near future, the police department in Johannesburg, South Africa now has their own robotic police force that help keep the crime rate down. Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) is the creator of these robots, but he has been working on something even more important. Deon has created an artificial intelligence program that could turn one of the robots into a thinking and feeling machine.

When Deon’s boss Michelle Bradley (Sigourney Weaver) shoots down his request to upload the program into a robot, he decides to do it in secret. Deon’s plans take a sudden detour when he is kidnapped by a gang looking to shut down the robotic police force so they can perform a major crime. Instead, they get a very damaged robot named AI.

The gang which consists of Ninja (Ninja), Yolandi (Yo-Landi Visser), and Amerika (Jose Pablo Cantillo) try to teach the childlike robot Chappie (Copley) to be a gangster, although Deon is none-too-thrilled about what his creation is being turned into. To make matters worse, Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman) is really furious that funding for his massive assault robot continues to decrease because all money is being put into Deon’s robotic cops. Because of this Vincent is up to no good with hopes of giving his own project some attention. If his robot looks familiar, it is a pretty blatant ED-209 knock off from “Robocop”. “Chappie” feels kind of like a “Robocop” and “Short Circuit” mash-up at times.

Despite the many flaws in “Chappie”, it is still quite entertaining and Copley is really fantastic here. Although I can see how the character will annoy some, I couldn’t help but love the direction they went with him. Although he grows and learns, he never loses that child-like-qualities. Up next for Blomkamp is a new installment of the “Alien” franchise and I hope he finds a juicy part for Copley who happens to be one of the best elements of each of his films.

By: Marc Ferman