It seems there’s some battery-life left in the RoboCop storyline. Neill Blomkamp has created an entertaining new variation on the traditional droid theme — in fact, it’s a witty tribute to RoboCop itself, wittier and more interesting than the recent dull remake.
After the disappointment of Elysium, Blomkamp is back on his game. Chappie is a futuristic law-and-order nightmare set (like Blomkamp’s apartheid parable District 9) in a chaotic Johannesburg perennially on the verge of social breakdown. The police department commissions thousands of “scout” robot officers from the kind of sinister corporation whose existence is mandatory in films like these — but which is not, in a departure from tradition, just blamed for everything in the end. These mechanised bad boys soon get the crime rate down, but there is tension in the corporation itself. The firm’s star geek Deon (Dev Patel) is secretly working on a fully operational AI robot, a scout that can think for itself — but he is also hated and envied by Vincent (Hugh Jackman), a rival engineer who has invested his whole failing career in a lesser creation, the Moose, a lumberingly huge assault robot resembling the obsolete early prototype in RoboCop.
Matters come to a head when gangsters kidnap Deon’s AI robot, played in motion-capture by Sharlto Copley; they bring it to life and name it Chappie. The gentle, sensitive creativity programmed into this childlike robot is perverted into a love of crime: the bewildered little robot boy becomes an angry, troubled robot teen. Later, when Chappie is briefly kidnapped by hostile forces, he will sob about being taken by a “man with a van”, like an abuse victim. Chappie is a broad, brash picture, which does not allow itself to get bogged down in arguing about whether or not “artificial intelligence” is possible. It has subversive energy and fun.
