Chappie

Sometimes big ideas, deep feelings and good intentions just aren’t enough. Case in point: Chappie, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s third feature. Blomkamp and co-screenwriter Terri Tatchell may have important, heartfelt things to say about the rise of artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, the encroachment of a police state and the toxic influence of poor parenting, but based on this dizzying, inept and staggeringly tone-deaf sci-fi action movie they have precious little aptitude for translating these concepts into coherent, engaging storytelling.

Welcome to the future, where everything sucks. In South Africa’s city, Johannesburg, crime rates have skyrocketed to such a degree that high-tech robocops designed by whiz kid Dev Patel have been dispatched to maintain law and order, much to the chagrin of fellow engineer Hugh Jackman, who’s had his funding for his own metallic militaristic monstrosity slashed. But Patel has more on his mind than keeping the peace – he’s on the verge of creating a computer program that can not only think but feel, and salvages a damaged police-droid in which to install it.

Unfortunately it falls into the hands of Die Antwoord sonic abominations Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser, playing ‘themselves’ as a pair of dipshit thugs who need some heavy-metal backup for their next crime spree. They try to transform the impressionable, childlike ‘Chappie’ (voiced and motion-capture acted by Blomkamp regular Sharlto Copley) into a gun-toting gangsta and things end badly for pretty much everyone concerned, the audience included.

To Blomkamp’s credit, he does have an eye for urban squalor and slow-motion carnage, and Chappie’s final half-hour is admirably deranged. But pretty much everything leading up to that is packed with leaden philosophy, cheap pathos, one-dimensional characterisations and, quite frankly, more Die Antwoord than any sane person could stomach. Chappie belongs in a junkyard.