I heard about this modern day Pinocchio a few months before its 2015 release. It had so much going for it:

• Directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9 ★★★★☆)
• Featuring Die Antwoord in starring roles and providing the soundtrack
• Starring Hugh Jackman, Dev Patel and Sigourney Weaver!

And yet, because of poor to middling reviews, I only got around to watching it yesterday. Let's dive in to a review.

Premise

The poster tells us much of what we need to know. A reject robot becomes sentient. More than that, he becomes an infant. Let's just say Short Circuit (1986) now, to get that out of the way. Chappie is like Short Circuit for the AI generation.

Dev Patel plays Deon, a lead engineer at the Tetravaal weapons company, who make police robots for Johannesburg, South Africa. His robots are extremely successful, having taken over the brunt of the cities frontline law enforcement.

Hugh Jackman's Vincent is a hotheaded ex-military engineer at the same company. He has made a different, human-controlled police robot prototype called MOOSE. He thinks it's safer than AI, and it's clearly more powerful than Deon's androids—resembling as it does an insanely tonked up version of Robocop's (1987) already insane ED-209.

Sigourney Weaver plays Michelle Bradley, Tetravaal's CEO, who constantly denies Vincent's requests to field test the MOOSE. Deon's robots are working fine. But Deon has other plans too. He wants to make the robots fully artificially intelligent. Sentient. Bradley also denies this request.

Deon goes ahead anyway and, by a plot contrivance, his newly-sentient robot ends up in the hands of Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er—Die Antwoord playing a gun-toting gangster version of themselves.

From here on, the film is about a baby being raised by criminals. And here is where we find the heart.

Feelings

By the start of act two I was in tears. Imagine all the kids you see being taught hate and violence. Kids being told not to be themselves. Kids being told not to be kids.

It was and is heartbreaking.

This film is not about a robot. It's about child abuse. It's about a child trying to survive in an unsurvivable situation.

It's also thrilling. There is enough visceral action to satisfy people who don't want to think. There is enough philosophy to satisfy people who do.

But Chappie is not without flaws.

Flaws

The most annoying thing about the film is that Chappie (voiced by Sharlto Copley) often refers to himself in the third person. It's not constant, and often it's endearing, but it did grate at times. Yolandi does the same thing when talking to Chappie, calling herself "mommy". It reminded me of that odd parental trait in the real world.

Plot-wise, there is a huge issue with verisimilitude in the form of extremely lax security at the weapons company. Employees are allowed to come in and out as they please. In particular they have unlimited personal access to a USB drive that can be used to re-programme all the police robots en masse. But Deon and Vincent run amok with whatever technology they desire.

It is possible to see this as essential to the film's fairytale nature. I chose to do that. Other reviewers have not been so tolerant, and this is why I believe they have condemned.

Tonally it seems not to know whether to be goofy or serious. For all the multicoloured energy that Ninja and Yolandi and their gang-mate, Amerika, supply, their characters feel inconsistent. They swerve unconvincingly between kind and ultra-violent.

Another incredible failing is that Dev Patel's acting is largely terrible. I've only seen him before in the magnificent Slumdog Millionaire, in which I remember him being excellent. But in Chappie he is wooden.

These previous two problems may have a lot to do with the writing. See what you think.

Finally, there is the development of Chappie. He is meant to be baby with an advanced learning rate. But he clearly knows things that he has not been taught, while remaining ignorant of other stuff. Again, it can be dismissed to some extent as essential to the fable, but for me it somewhat eroded the internal logic.

Conclusion

I really wanted to love Chappie but I only like it a lot (phrasal credit: gamingstation).

It's more Robot & Frank (2012) than it is Short Circuit; it's a little too messy to be a classic.

But it's also a film that will stay with me. It's a think-piece for so many things: childcare, criminality and justice, gun control, the nature of artificial intelligence. I could go on.

It also has a wicked soundtrack by Die Antwoord themselves, rounded out by a score from the inimitable Hans Zimmer.

Chappie is a flawed triumph and deserves better reviews than it originally received.

★★★★☆

Thanks for reading!