Chappie [Review by Haus]

I actually really liked this movie. But to understand Chappie and to understand why I said “actually” just there, we’re going to have to get a little path-dependent. In three parts.

Part the first: Director Neill Blomkamp and I go way back, kind of. Fully eleven years ago I first watched this little YouTube clip, my first exposure to a new blend of tight special effects with rough, documentary-style handheld camera work. The latter obscures the former, obliterating that “too clean” look that cinematic effects often have, setting the rendered beings in and among rough, hastily framed, jagged and jumpy footage. End result? They look damned real. The Tetra Vaal clip was only a minute and twenty seconds long, and I loved it. Was it an art project? Did someone really build this thing? It was one of those clips where I bet three quarters of the people who saw it totally bought it. Man, I thought. This guy should make a movie.

Fast forward five years. I’m watching District 9 and it’s feeling distinctly familiar, but I can’t place why. Then, during the lab break-in scene, it flashes by, a logo on the wall — “Tetra Vaal.” Complain if you like that I should’ve known all along or whatever, but I didn’t, and closing that particular loop ranked among my top filmgoing revelations. Here he was, the YouTube robot guy, delivering so very hard on his early promise. District 9 ranks among the top sci-fi films of all time.

Then came Blomkamp’s act two, Elysium. Understandably excited (Matt Damon! Ringworld! Future class war! More Sharlto Copley!), I snagged an early preview showing in New York and then sat increasingly uneasy as a visually beautiful but flat and heavy-handed picture played out. Hmm. Shyamalan syndrome? Lucas-itis? Sophomore slump?

Part the second: Watch “Enter the Ninja,” an essentially indescribable but comedically brilliant 2010 South African rap video by Die Antwoord. Another YouTube find that I shared heavily. I even traded messages with Leon Botha — the South African artist with progeria who’s featured in the video — on Facebook for a few months. (He died in 2011 at age 26, making him one of the longest-living people with this disease.)

Part the third: Easy. I grew up watching Robocop and working on my ED-209 impression.

And now, this.

Chappie is straight up weird, and I like it. A lot of people won’t. You may not. But I do.

Here’s the setup. It’s 2016, and police droids called Scouts patrol Johannesburg. (Blomkamp examined the harshness of mechanized law enforcement in Elysium, and largely leaves the issue alone here.) A stern and be-mulletted Hugh Jackman champions his own huge, ED-209 style creation called the Moose — a large military-type robot that’s remotely controlled by a human pilot. (It’s ED-209 for the drone era.) Tetra Vaal CEO Sigourney Weaver (small role, featureless) shoots Jackman down — the Scouts are doing well, so to heck with the Moose, she’ll leave the Scouts alone.

Meanwhile, Scout creator Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) has a breakthrough Red Bull-fueled night and writes an artificial intelligence module. (Silicon Valley, collective eye-roll please.)

The module ends up surreptitiously installed on a beat-up old Scout, and even more curiously this robot — Chappie (Sharlto Copley!), gifted with a young child’s consciousness and the ability to learn — “grows up” with Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er (that’s right, of Die Antwoord).

So yeah, this is a super strange movie, featuring an android straight outta juvie strutting around Joburg in bling chains and talking tough with the crew from Enter the Ninja while his Slumdog Millionaire Creator-figure gives him rubber chickens and a Mulleted Wolverine pilots the end-level boss from Robocop.

Sure, the problems of Elysium are all here: It’s overambitious and disjointed, heavy-handed at times and sometimes painfully unrealistic, even on its own terms. Yes, it grabs frantically at big ideas, then does little with them. Yes, it glosses over a lot, story wise, and no, it’s not the rich social commentary District 9 was. And it has new problems, weird ones — for instance, it plays like a two hour advertisement for Die Antwoord, which I wasn’t expecting and which I hazard that American filmgoing audiences will not get, like, at all. (It’s really an orgy of Die Antwoord imagery, slogans, and screen time. The inmates took over the asylum, on that front.)

But it’s just so deliciously wigged out. It has heart, it has pace, it has energy. It has great SFX visuals, and some nice action sequences. It’s a crazy metal-chunk gumbo of all these THINGS I’ve really loved before. And the Nissan GT-R scene is worth the price of the ticket alone.

Upshot? I think it’s worth a watch. Chappie the robot is a naive and imperfect delinquent with a neck full of bling but a kind heart. And so, really, is this film.

Haus Verdict: Wildly ambitious thematically and in that sense a hard flop, but visually stunning and totally over the top. Utterly buries the needle on the weird-o-meter. I really enjoyed it, but can’t promise you will. 

Chappie opens Friday March 6, 2015.