'Chappie' review by Captain Raptor

'Chappie' review by Jake Boyle

Neill Blomkamp is, on aggregate, a good filmmaker, having created one modern classic and one waste of time. District 9's genius was so great that it made the flaws of similarly aspiring Elysium all the more obvious, so taking things in a different, lighter direction for a third film makes sense - although perhaps at the same time a little disheartening, Blomkamp being one of the few directors in science-fiction who still retains the genre's original socio-political colouring. 

Chappie is handicapped by an error so colossal that I can't be sure that anything else wrong with the film isn't just a ripple effect. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided it would be funny to have the unbelievably appalling rap duo Die Antwoord play themselves as two of the main characters. To fully discuss how disastrous, woeful, awful, deplorable and misjudged this is would require a review longer than War & Peace. They show as meagre a capability for acting as they do for music and basic human decency, and anything coming out of their mouths doesn't even have the semblance of any real human being, let alone a modicum of emotion. Further dragging down the tone is a script packed with dialogue very overtly explaining things that were painfully obvious, often because they'd already been said three or four times. The concept itself is interesting but it's significantly marred by the constant reiteration of basic information and things that really go without saying.

It's a shame that so much went wrong because Chappie himself is an absolute delight. His inhuman naivety makes him an appealing cute character, and the few jokes of the film that stick exploit this to the max, contrasting his good-natured enthusiasm with the street crime he gets tricked into committing.  The design and seamless CGI nicely brings the character to life, and the always brilliant Sharlto Copley perfectly embodies the character even while mostly restricted to posture and inflections. The rest of the characters aren't developed enough to really provide the other actors with much opportunity, but Dev Patel is convincing and likable in his role as the nebbish engineer/father figure, and Hugh Jackman seems to relish the opportunity to play such an obnoxious character, even if his level of evil seems to ricochet up and down as the plot demands it.