‘Chappie’ Is Funny For All The Wrong Reasons

CHAPPIE

The elevator pitch for Chappie sounds like a sitcom set-up: a highly-advanced AI robot ends up in the hands of Die Antwoord. Watch Ninja teach a robot how to be a Jo-berg gangsta! To shoot a gun sideways! To talk Zef! If that sounds stupid, there’s literally a montage, here, in which Ninja spraypaints tattoos on the robot, and puts gold chains around his neck. It’s a minor premise that seems worthy of a music-video, at best; yet, here, gets stretched —way beyond breaking—to feature length. And, worst of all, director Neill Blomkamp plays this robo-wigga minstrel show not for laughs, but drama.

Blomkamp made two short films —2004’s Tetra Vaal and 2006’s Tempbot— addressing AI androids, but in his first two features, 2009’s District 9 and 2013’s Elysium, the South African filmmaker authored more humanist near-future tales. Each, beyond their blockbuster explosions, was a sledgehammer-subtle immigration parable: District 9’s interloping aliens leading to plentiful apartheid symbolism; Elysium’s wealthy-playground-space-station filled with US 1%ers walling themselves off from a brown planet below. Neither was entirely successful —especially District 9, which half-assedly used the already-tired found-footage gimmick, then inexplicably abandoned it mid-stream— but Blomkamp had an undeniable audaciousness, a political axe to grind, and a determination to make original stories in a culture of brand-managing and reboots (that’s ended: he’s now due to helm the next Alien movie).

Those who were all in on Blomkamp as blockbuster auteur will surely need to reconsider after suffering through Chappie. If a film is only as compelling as its hero, then this gives us one of the worst in living memory: its titular CGI robot is half-Number 5, half-Jar Jar Binks. Around him, the cliché-rich script scatters a collection of two-dimensional cut-outs: Dev Patel the nervous, nerdy engineer who’s birthed the android sentience; Sigourney Weaver the frowning military-contractor CEO; Jose Pablo Cantillo a sneering cholo; Brandon Auret a crimelord whose seemingly just wandered out of the WWE.

In this context, Hugh Jackman seems excellent (even though: seeing him two-finger-typing at a computer brings horrifying Swordfish flashbacks) as a renegade rival engineer rocking a shorts-wearing, mullet’d style part-Steve Irwin, part-LA Pocock. But that impressiveness is entirely contextual: Jackman is, notably, not a member of Die Antwoord. The South African rappers — a musical meme that peaked circa 2010 — may have turned themselves into human cartoons long ago, but that doesn’t make them actors. Each, Ninja and Yolandi Visser, has the subtlety of juvenile delinquents dropped in a high-school drama-department: yelling half their lines, playing emotion (Frustration! Rage! Menace! Sadness!) with one-note simplicity.

Were they on hand to make a cameo or offer comic relief, that’d be one thing. But they’re the main humans in the story, and the badly-misjudged sentimentality at the movie’s core turns Chappie into a love-story between the robot and his ‘mummy’. We’re expected to actually emotionally care when the endless barrage of automatic weaponfire and explosions comes calling.

Its climax is, when it arrives, kind of embarrassing; people are literally shot and fall to the ground in slow-motion, the melodrama turning maudlin amidst the CGI robots. The film has the cheap-and-nasty feeling of a 1980s action-movie, but stupider. Tellingly, an early scene finds Chappie stumbling on an episode of He-Man, a cheap bit of ’80s kitsch that’s designed to land a knowing chuckle or two. But the writing, the good/bad morality, and the flagrant lesson-teaching of Chappie has more in common with an episode of He-Man than Blomkamp would want to admit.

INSURGENT

Befitting any YA franchise worth its cash-cow film series, Divergent made the dystopian-near-future seem a lot like high-school: the guardians of the walled-in ruins of Chicago (shot, thanks to tax breaks, in Georgia) promoting peace by dividing their citizens into five cliques —geeks, jocks, hippies, etc— instantly identifiable by their matching attire; a coming-of-age teenager choosing their lifelong wardrobe-allegiance in a ceremony part reality-TV-show special, part fraternity ritual. It was a ridiculous premise ripe for laughing at —Candor, the faction devoted to truth, all wear black-and-white, because symbolism— but one whose conceived world had that daffy-episode-of-Star Trek charm.

Sadly, at the close of Divergent, all the high-school handwringing (Will you pass or fail? Will that blandly-handsome boy kiss you?) was tossed aside, as the kids in its story were thrown into the real world. Meaning: war. Meaning: when Insurgent opens, following in the wake of its prior instalment, we’re dropped immediately into conflict, into yet another movie featuring faceless armies running around holding guns, and firefight shootouts free from realism or gravity.

Heroine Shailene Woodley, blandly-handsome Theo James, mopey brother Ansel Elgort, and rakish snake Miles Teller are on the run from the ruling regime’s masked men in armed vehicles, each possessing an amazing ability to evade barrages of automatic weaponfire as they run across fields towards coincidentally-timed trains. They’re outlaws who’ve fallen through the cracks between the factions, as the once-peaceful caste system has devolved into a fight for control. It’s Politics 101 type stuff, with Kate Winslet as the heartless ruler out to accrue more power (a villain named Jeanine!); Naomi Watts the leader of a rebel militia with her own scores to settle.

In the battle for power, everyone is, essentially, fighting over Woodley; this another series in which a regular kid from humble origins turns out to be some quasi-mystical chosen one. It’s just so coincidental that, in the words of Winslet, it “almost defies the realms of all possibility!” At least that piece of dialogue seems self-aware; otherwise Insurgent features too many lines that feel like generic-action-movie placeholders left in. Like when Woodley actually says “I know it doesn’t make sense, but you have to trust me!” when she gets a hunch as to the secret lurking in the heart of the film’s MacGuffin, a flashing, far-future, cod-mystical games-console fashioned as bespoke’70s-art-nouveau-revival knick-knack.

As with the first film, there’s a blind acceptance of the virtual: Woodley’s heroism, when not dodging automatic weaponfire, largely limited to various missions in dramatic Sims, mental fantasy-worlds that let the film to go entirely into a CGI wonderland that looks like a dream sequence, but plays like a video game. Woodley’s final heroic act involves conquering 5 sequential missions, with the Final Boss awaiting her at the end the person she hates the most: herself! Sadly, unlike Scott Pilgrim, she doesn’t shoot the shit and make a brunch date with her shadow rival, but confront her demons in the grandest form of narrative therapy.