Neill Blomkamp won near-universal admiration as the director of 2011’s District 9, but the heat is cooling about as fast as the bullets fly in his latest, Chappie, starring Die Antwoord’s Ninja and Yolandi Visser as well as Hugh Jackman.
Dev Patel is in it too as Deon Wilson, a brilliant young engineer who designs a police force of robots that patrols Johannesburg. Deon works out how to illegally implant consciousness in artificially intelligent beings, while Vincent Moore (Jackman) – an embittered older engineer whose prototype has been rendered obsolete by Deon’s sleeker models – plots to bring him down.
Ninja and Yolandi retain their own names and play scavengers living in an abandoned industrial plant. They decide to kidnap Deon, for reasons only really explicable by the mechanics of the plot. Deon builds the duo a robot of their own so they can stage a heist and pay off a kingpin who’ll kill them if they don’t stump up $20 million in a week. Or something like that. The intersection of the world of Deon and Moore with Ninja et al. is one of the plot’s least credible contrivances, and that’s saying something.
Yolandi christens the droid Chappie, and a good third of the movie is taken up with cutesy scenes of Chappie learning gangsta slang and having bedtime stories read to him as he sits up in bed. Chappie, voiced by Blomkamp standby Sharlto Copley, is insistently ingratiating, engineered by the director and his co-writer Terri Tatchell to elicit maximum pathos.
Blomkamp makes action films that are also allegories of the most staggeringly unsubtle kind. In District 9 and Elysium, he wrapped stories of Apartheid and global inequality in science-fiction clothing, but both are such literal analogies that they fail to illuminate anything. They gesture towards metaphor, but stop at the point of simile. As with so much contemporary art, Chappie presents to us the modern world – in this case, the frontiers of AI – but doesn’t bother to say anything about it.
2/5 stars
Chappie is in cinemas now.
