Chap­pie

Neill Blomkamp is a god­damn genius. Neill Blomkamp is also an abysmal film­mak­er. The great mis­con­cep­tion of his stunt­ed career is the fal­la­cy that these two things are mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. Few peo­ple (if any) have dis­played such an impres­sive knack for build­ing an out­sized stu­dio movie around such con­vinc­ing­ly organ­ic CG on the cheap (Dis­trict 9 cost just $30 mil­lion), and the fact that it’s always the same out­sized stu­dio movie doesn’t appear to be much of an obstacle.

Chap­pie ($50 mil­lion) is the director’s lat­est rough and tum­ble sci-fi saga about a social­ly imbal­anced future in which a piece of vio­lent rogue tech­nol­o­gy upends the sta­tus quo of a world that’s tee­ter­ing on the brink of chaos. And, like both of Blomkamp’s pre-exist­ing fea­tures, the poten­tial of its premise is gut­ted by the whiz-bang banal­i­ty of its storytelling.

Chap­pie, like Dis­trict 9 before it, begins with a bar­rage of faux doc­u­men­tary footage in which some talk­ing heads reflect on how incred­i­ble the film’s sto­ry is going to be (“I didn’t think I’d see some­thing like this in my life­time!”). From there, we’re intro­duced to the his­tor­i­cal­ly strat­i­fied South African city of Johan­nes­burg, where the crime rate has plum­met­ed 300 per cent since the deploy­ment of a robot­ic police force.

Despite sin­gle-hand­ed­ly invent­ing the tech­nol­o­gy that made these gun-wield­ing android cops pos­si­ble, Deon Wil­son (Dev Patel) still works in a cramped cubi­cle at the tech­nol­o­gy firm that owns his cre­ation. Nev­er­the­less, Deon’s suc­cess still man­ages to enrage his most mus­cu­lar and envi­ous col­league (a mul­let­ed and unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly inef­fec­tu­al Hugh Jack­man), whose dia­logue con­sists of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ways of say­ing, ​“I’ll see you in the third act.” Everything’s hunky until, one fate­ful after­noon, a moti­va­tion­al cat poster shows Deon how to replace the AI of his drones with gen­uine sen­tience. Enter the Chappie.

Through a wild and crazy series of events, Chap­pie winds up being the prop­er­ty of Nin­ja and Yolan­di, bet­ter known as Die Antwo­ord (a very real rap-rave group, the mar­quee mem­bers of which exist at the inter­sec­tion between 8 Mile and The Fifth Ele­ment, and may not even know that they were in this movie). Under the gun to come up with a huge sum of mon­ey in less than a week, Nin­ja and Yolan­di engi­neer a heist, intend­ing to use Chap­pie as their secret weapon.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for these low-lev­el gang­sters, the lanky, rab­bit-eared machine is less Skynet than he is a motion-cap­tured Jack (of the Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Jacks) — Deon has implant­ed him with a human intel­lect, and though Chap­pie learns at an incred­i­bly accel­er­at­ed rate, he still starts as an infant. Though the film spans less than sev­en days, the rap­pers quick­ly begin to regard them­selves as Chappie’s par­ents, the endear­ing emer­gence of Yolandi’s mater­nal instincts mak­ing for many of the best moments that Blomkamp has ever man­aged to cap­ture. And as Chap­pie comes of age, the wish­es of his par­ents con­flict­ing with those of Deon (his express­ly non-vio­lent god), the film aban­dons its pre­tense to become a para­ble about what Chap­pie means for human­i­ty, becom­ing instead a rather wit­less por­trait of what human­i­ty means for Chappie.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, it all looks amaz­ing. Chap­pie him­self is Blomkamp’s great­est achieve­ment, a weath­ered and tac­tile CG show­case who would be motion-per­formed to per­fec­tion if not for Sharl­to Copley’s grat­ing vocal work (the actor’s spas­mod­ic deliv­ery helps his gold chain-wear­ing char­ac­ter sound like the robot ver­sion of Poochie you always knew you nev­er wanted).

Less indige­nous to our world than Andy Serkis’ ape alter-egos, but just as at home in it, Chap­pie is such a remark­ably real achieve­ment that the movie around him looks that much more arti­fi­cial by con­trast — the action looks that much soft­er, the stakes that much small­er, and the ideas that much sim­pler. By the time the plot skit­ters com­plete­ly off the rails, that Chap­pie is Blomkamp’s best movie is com­pelling evi­dence that he shouldn’t be the one mak­ing them.