[7]

Chappie starts out rough, juggling multiple storylines and shifting our character identification many times throughout the first 30 minutes, but once the title character is ‘born,’ the film gets more and more thematically compelling. Chappie is a robot designed to be a police officer (shades of RoboCop permeate in more ways than one), but just as he’s damaged and marked for destruction, his inventor (Slumdog Millionaire‘s Dev Patel) selects him for a bold new experiment — giving consciousness to a machine. And it works.

Patel’s character and Chappie are both kidnapped by Ninja and Yo-Landi of Die Antwoord fame, both playing criminals on the outskirts of Johannesburg who want Chappie to help them with heists. Patel plays the good father, while Ninja plays the bad one. Chappie, who learns exponentially by hanging out with them, is caught between the two father figures, learning all the moral lessons most human children learn before they come of age.

I have to hand it to writer/director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) for keeping me engaged and disturbed throughout the entire allegory here. It was very distressing for me to watch Chappie learning from Ninja and Y0-Landi’s thieving, druggie characters — watching them lie to Chappie as they would a young child, and watching him believe them. It’s just evil. But I believe this turns out to be part of Blomkamp’s desired effect. Chappie ultimately takes the good, takes the bad, learns a lot about his world and the people in it, and begins to make his own decisions.

Like District 9 before it, Chappie opens up in its third act and introduces new concepts and dramatic complications that make its climax more surprising than those of most other studio fare. I enjoyed the genuine twists. The film’s got heart and it’s full of interesting ideas and thematic notions, especially for a Frankenstein fan like me. The script is a bit messy, but mostly for just being so ambitious. The corporate subplot involving Hugh Jackman’s and Sigourney Weaver’s characters is a little tired, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: An interesting mess will always win out over a tidy bore.

With Sharlto Copley as the voice of Chappie.