For Neill Blomkamp’s return to the mean streets of Johannesburg, the District 9 director gives us a sweet-hearted tale of futuristic ultra-violence that will do nothing for the South African tourist industry. Chappie presents a hellish vision of an overrun, ruined metropolis where the police have been forced to call in military-style robots to keep the horrific, gun-crazed local criminal element under control. When one unit is damaged in battle, the mechanical army’s thoughtful inventor (Dev Patel) decides to experiment with a sentience programme he’s been working on. The result is Chappie, the world’s first sapient machine.
Early trailers hinted at a gentle Short Circuit-style tale of benevolent artificial intelligence, but Blomkamp’s final product gives us more than a few surprises. Here are the top five:
1. Die Antwoord’s casting is a stroke of genius The South African rap-rave duo play mean versions of themselves, bada** jive-spitting gangsters who kidnap Chappie and his creator. They set out to school their vulnerable mechanical prodigy in the arts of carjacking and armed robbery in a desperate effort to pay off a debt to an even nastier mobster — but it’s not long before the pair find themselves morphing into unlikely parent figures for the fledgling robot toddler. Blomkamp’s decision to cast such well-known figures might have proven a distraction, but the musicians are so deeply embedded in their roles that they lend the movie a rare, hyperreal intensity that might just make Chappie a cult favourite for decades.
2. Hugh Jackman makes a great bemulleted Aussie villain. The Wolverine star is generally known for heroic and romantic roles, but add a dodgy Barnet and “ocker” Aussie brogue into the mix and you get sneering Chappie madman Vincent Moore. A rival scientist at the headquarters of the company that produced the robot and his non-sapient siblings, Moore wants to police the streets of Johannesburg with a huge and brutal, human-controlled Ed209-style model instead.
3. Oliver Twist is alive, well and living in Johannesburg. Chappie’s connection to Charles Dickens’s 1838 novel is clear: the innocent who falls into the hands of miscreants in a ruthless world of poverty and violence; the charming, good natured lust for life in the face of terrible cynicism. Blomkamp’s film borrows heavily from RoboCop, and the film-maker even casts Alien’s Sigourney Weaver as Patel’s put-upon boss as he freewheels furiously through genre tropes like a kid in a science-fiction-movie sweetshop. But it’s a much older story that ensures the movie transcends its 80s action roots.
4. Blomkamp’s most tonally uneven movie may be his best. The film-maker’s most recent effort, 2013’s Elysium, made a lot more sense on paper. A conceptually clever tale of future haves and have-nots, it also had Hollywood stars such as Matt Damon and Jodie Foster on tap. Chappie, with its unusually cast hotchpotch of gun-toting action and elegant discussion of the nature of humanity, is a far more offbeat affair. But like District 9, the new film is such a culturally pungent romp through the Johannesburg badlands that it’s easier to catch a ride than grumble at the odd clunky moment.
5. Andy Serkis may have a rival for top mocap maestro. Sharlto Copley’s turn as Chappie is surely the most engaging motion-capture performance since Andy Serkis’s Gollum. The CGI robot is utterly believable as a fledgling, sentient lifeform — by turns inquisitive, sensitive, angry and distressed. Watching him thrown headlong into a venomous third-world maelstrom of energy and hate is upsetting, exhilarating and at times very, very funny. If Blomkamp has cut corners elsewhere by borrowing from cult science fiction’s rich soup of over-the-top futuristic silliness, there is nothing ersatz about Copley’s splendid headline act.
Chappie is currently showing in the UAE.
