“CHAPPiE”

If Bono directed films, he’d be Neill Blomkamp. His features smugly denounce the ruination of class and racial conflicts while nonetheless seeking easy refuge in clichéd, half-sketched images of said conflicts for the sake of drama. Everyone mocks Elysium and its “for the price of one cup of coffee” misery montages, but District 9 was equally as stupid, undermining its nominal anti-racist message by, among other things, presenting a primitive, old-gods-worshipping gangster as a key villain. Blomkamp’s ability to flatter an audience with a liberal theme while building his work upon the most reactionary, condescendingly “cool” images should have Hollywood throwing money at him, but alas for poor Johannesburg, that beleaguered city can add his loyalty to its long list of woes.

CHAPPiE, like Blomkamp’s other work, is so derivative that it’s not even fun to point out all its vastly superior forebears. But it’s nonetheless stunning to see how much he takes from RoboCop to set up his own world, from a police force crewed by droids supplied by a private corporation, Tetravaal, to a gigantic warbot prototype redolent ED-209. Yet this setup matters only insofar as it establishes a world with robots in it, all the better for Tetravaal programmer Deon (Dev Patel) to have test shells for an A.I. program he believes will change the world.

The speed with which the film abandons its images of militarized, state-of-the-art police to leap to the production of a sentient robot prefigures a plot that wildly careens from idea to idea, never settling enough to give breadth to any topic. The baby-minded robot quickly falls in with some local hoods (Die Antwoord’s Ninja and Yolandi Visser, and Jose Pablo Cantillo as their Yank tagalong) who raise the robot to perform a heist. Scenes of CHAPPiE’s rapid coming-of-age conjure questions of nature vs. nurture as Yolandi’s maternal care for the robot rubs against the men’s violent lessons. Later, CHAPPiE moves on to existential quandaries, lashing out at the flawed body into which Deon put his consciousness. Thanks to Blomkamp’s love of ghetto imagery, you get to see the latter while the robot wears stacks of gold chains and sports makeshift tattoos in the form of spray-painted logos, because God knows a debate on determinism goes down so much easier when you can look at a stereotype.

Pity the poor actors who have to lend pathos to all of this. Patel plays the unprepared parent so broadly that his beseeching smiles and baby-talk verge on the sardonic, while Ninja must tailor his oscillations of kindness and brutality not to his character’s complexity but sheer narrative convenience. Hugh Jackman appears as Deon’s workplace rival: a mulleted, khaki-shorts-wearing lunatic who casually sports a pistol in an office environment and seems to spend most of his days tacitly daring his coworkers to report him to HR. We’re deep into Jackman’s eff-you money era at this point, and it’s not hard to imagine him showing up on set just long enough to spout bizarre aphorisms like “angry as a frog in a sock” before sauntering back to his trailer to count Wolverine royalties. Only Visser, who watches over little Lost Boy CHAPPiE like a cokehead Wendy, shines, if only because she commits most fully to the madness.

CHAPPiE displays all the hallmarks of Blomkamp’s half-assedness. An opening framing device of reminiscing talking heads never resurfaces after we leap into the past. The relay-race approach to theme drops each idea the second Blomkamp spots its untenability, yet each dead-end idea remains, a Sapphic fragment of some potentially interesting topic left to twist in the wind. Above all, the film fails on its contradictory notions of violence, preaching nonviolence but reaching its purest state of bliss in a stupidly violent climax, peaking when CHAPPiE finally takes up a gun. District 9 outrageously won Blomkamp comparisons to Spielberg, and the latter filmmaker amusingly beat the South African to the punch on this subject matter with A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which didn’t need this movie’s self-deprecating humor because it had the courage of its convictions. That film followed up on the idea of a machine with a child’s sentience, curiosity, and fear; CHAPPiE has a robot that says “motherfucker.”

1 star out of 4