CHAPPIE SHORT CIRCUITS
What happens when you cram a film
CHAPPIE
★ ★ 1/2 Starring: Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman Directed by: Neill Blomkamp Running time: 120 minutes Chappie, much like last year’s Transcendence, is an example of what happens when you put 10 kilos of ideas in a five-kilo bag. South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, who made such a splash with his aliens-on-Earth movie District 9 in 2009, here conflates a bunch of AI and sci-fi elements that never quite mesh into a satisfying whole.
There’s more than a touch of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner in the notion of an artificial intelligence that seeks its maker and ultimately finds him all too human. And there’s circuitry as well from Short Circuit, the 1986 sci-fi comedy that proclaimed: “Number Five is alive!”
Number Five in this case is Number 22, one of a squadron of humanoid robot police officers patrolling the streets in a nearfuture, crime-ridden Johannesburg. If that sounds a bit RoboCop-y, get a load of Moose, the larger variant and a close cousin to the evil ED-209, which was brought down by a flight of stairs in the original RoboCop.
After Number 22 is damaged during a raid and written off as junk, it is rescued from the crusher by genius scientist Deon (Dev Patel) and receives a new program that makes it self-aware. At the same time, however, Deon is kidnapped by a gang of thugs who want him to reveal the robots’ Achilles off-switch so they can knock over an armoured truck with impunity.
Thus Number 22, rechristened Chappie after the colonial colloquialism “happy chappie,” grows up in the company of criminals. Being an imitative sort, it quickly learns to swagger rather than walk, pepper its language with four-letter words and hold a gun sideways when shooting.
Yet here is where the film starts to develop terabyte-sized plot holes. The gangsters not only let Deon live but allow him to leave their lair. He then returns on numerous occasions to check in on his robotic offspring, teaching it to paint and making it promise not to commit any crimes.
Why do Chappie’s new outlaw family allow such meddling? For that matter, why doesn’t Deon tell the police where these gangsters are hiding? He’s got the AI program on a drive, so it would be easy to reinstall it in a new host without risking his own life in the process. And Chappie’s damaged body only has five days to live.
The narrative answer is that the film would be over, but the logical answers remains stubbornly hidden. Just as it’s unclear why Hugh Jackman, who co-stars as an evil scientist with his own robot-police plans, looks as if he was given a mullet haircut by a drunken Vulcan barber and then dressed like a theme-park safari ranger.
The robot Chappie, realized in a motion-capture performance by Blomkamp regular Sharlto Copley, is nonetheless fascinating to watch. Its humanoid appearance is given an animalistic touch through the addition of jackrabbit ears that swivel in time with its emotions. And its mimicry extends to such gestures as nose-scratching, unnecessary but humanizing.
Equally captivating is Chappie’s adoptive family, a trio of tattooed ne’er-do-wells torn between a parental concern for their newly sentient companion and a desire to use it to further their schemes. Adding to the conflict is that they’re in hock to an even meaner junkyard dog, and must find some ready cash or face unpleasant consequences.
But acting and effects will only take a movie so far. Blomkamp’s screenplay grows increasingly outlandish as the plot develops, until we’re rolling our eyes at the science-fiction elements it tries to shoehorn into the action.
Deon is in thrall to the notion of a self-aware robot, telling his boss (Sigourney Weaver, underused) that artificial intelligence will allow it to look at a piece of art and judge it.
I’d hate to think that a machine could ever replace a film critic, but I’d be curious to know what Chappie would think of Chappie. So much about the film doesn’t compute.