From the makers of The District 9 director comes this, Chappie the new robotic Film you most watch

 Here’s one theory of artificial intelligence: as a movie concept, it’s only artificially interesting. In Chappie, the third feature directed by Neill Blomkamp (following District 9 and Elysium), we’re supposed to be wowed by the futuristic idea of a clanking robot implanted with a computer chip that allows him to develop consciousness. But everything about the character, from his fast-working ‘brain’ to the cutely anthropomorphic way he’s voiced by Sharlto Copley as a “gangsta” with a heart of gold, feels like old news.

Chappie opens with a TV news report detailing how Johannesburg has solved its crime problem by hiring an army of corporate police droids.


 You may wonder if Blomkamp is ripping off the 1987 dystopian classic RoboCop as shamelessly as he appears to be, and the answer is: no question about it. Does he think today’s audiences haven’t seen Paul Verhoeven’s film? Blomkamp has always been a bit of a cut-and-paste mix-master: District 9, for all its apparent originality, was a frenetic mash-up of Independence Day (the eerie hovering spaceship), Starship Troopers (the videogame zeal with which aliens got splattered), The Fly (the transformation of Copley’s clownish bureaucrat), and – yes – RoboCop too. But District 9 is a paragon of originality next to Chappie.

The new movie is jammed with fireball explosions and swaggering criminal badasses. But oddly enough the film it most resembles is Short Circuit, the dreadful 1985 comedy that essentially recasts ET as a cuddly robot. Chappie, too, presents its title character as a mechanical innocent who Blomkamp begs us to find lovable in almost every scene. Not that there’s that much to love about him. Built out of the damaged carcass of another robot, Chappie has rabbit ears that look like a machine-tooled version of Mercury’s winged helmet and bright white eyes that resemble tiny digital games of  Noughts and Crosses. Apart from that, though, he’s a little anonymous – like a carburettor attached to the rear of an old TV set. When his creator, Deon (Dev Patel), is kidnapped by a trio of criminal punks who need to pull off a heist, the four of them proceed to raise Chappie from a state of naive inexperience, teaching him how to walk and talk, how to cuddle with his ‘Mommy’ (played by the tiny but feral Yo-Landi Visser), and, finally, how to carjack and swagger like a ghetto tough.

Cobbled together
In terms of special effects, Chappie is an achievement: we always feel its title character is a running, leaping metal-limbed object, not an actor in a suit or a CGI concoction. I have no idea how Blomkamp choreographed many of the scenes, yet this level of technical wizardry is no longer enough to sustain a movie, and maybe it never was. The sneakiest thing about RoboCop, and also the most artful, was the way it presented its title droid/man as a steely, monotone-voiced enforcer, doing what he was programmed to do – and then let his glimmers of humanity sneak up on you. In Blomkamp’s film, the moment Chappie comes alive, he cringes and cowers like some poor lost faun, and everything about his body language says: “I need a hug.” It’s the audience that’s being programmed, coerced into seeing him not as a character but as a sentimental action-figure mascot.

The trouble is, there’s no-one else on screen to care about. Patel is a likable actor, but he does nothing to show us why his brainy inventor is worth more than minor-character status. Hugh Jackman, with a hideous mullet, plays Patel’s sinister office rival, who’s plotting to launch his own police robot – a giant, crablike monster-machine that’s so clearly out of RoboCop, your jaw may drop. Whenever Jackman is on screen, flexing his canned-ham biceps and plotting behind an unctuous smile, the film gathers a little force. The criminals, however, are so underdeveloped, characterised mostly by their garish tattoos and Mohawks, that you may feel like sending them to a reform school for overacting.

District 9 was acclaimed for its racial allegory, and that was certainly one of its more original aspects, but in Chappie, a movie in which the droid hero wears a rapper’s outsize gold chains, the allegory is so simplistic that you may feel a twinge of embarrassment. The character of Chappie is offered up as the childlike soul of ghetto oppression, who triumphs because he’s a saint inside. But that is patronising, to put it mildly. The movie demonstrates that Blomkamp, while talented, is an outrageously derivative filmmaker with a gift for amped-up action, but that his ‘progressive’ vision bounces off stereotypes that shouldn’t be trotted out in the first place