Film Review: Film predecessors give life to ‘Chappie’

Neill Blomkamp — creator of the excellent “District 9” (2009) and the somewhat less excellent “Elysium” (2013) — returns with “Chappie,” a film about a sentient robot. It might seem more satisfying if this turf hadn’t been so repeatedly picked over in recent — and even not so recent — predecessors.

Dev Patel — who also stars in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” another of this week’s new releases — plays Deon, a brilliant engineer designing artificial intelligence software for the South African robotics corporation Tetra Vaal. Tetra Vaal is flying high over the effectiveness of what — were there no intellectual property laws — might be called robocops. Likewise the Johannesburg police are delighted with their lowered crime rates since putting a bunch of these titanium troopers on the street.

Deon is more interested in the possibilities of creating human-style consciousness in the machines, a project that Tetra Vaal’s boss (Sigourney Weaver) has ordered shut down. At the same time, she also shuts down the pet project of Deon’s polar opposite, the trigger-happy Vincent (Hugh Jackman) — a giant stomper of a robot, whose main mode is excessive force.

Deon continues on the sly, using a discarded unit. But the moment he reaches his goal, he and the robot — about to be dubbed Chappie — are kidnapped by three punkish street thugs, Ninja (Ninja), Yo-Landi (Yo-Landi Visser), and Amerika (Jose Pablo Cantillo). Deon and Yo-Landi (whose maternal instincts kick in) want to give the impressionable, childlike Chappie a loving upbringing, but Ninja wants to employ tough love to mold him in his own image, for the sake of an upcoming heist.

In design and plot, the original “RoboCop” (1987) is the central model here, though Chappie’s cutesy personality owes more to Number 5 from the 1986 “Short Circuit.” Dozens of other films — from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1926) to last year’s “The Imitation Game” — touch on the idea of machines with consciousness and/or a soul, many with more success.

But Blomkamp quickly loses interest in the metaphysical questions in any case; this may be a good thing, since, unless you’re digging down into the hard science of it, the questions remain unanswered and possibly unanswerable. Once the criminals get involved, “Chappie” turns into a liberal fable, about how environment and early influences have the power to transform even basically good creatures into monsters.

Jackman’s and Weaver’s roles are relatively small; they’re secondary villains, and their subplots seem determined more by an ideological point about corporate evil than by the needs of the story.

The casting of Ninja (his far less tough-sounding real name: Watkin Tudor Jones) and Yo-Landi probably has much greater resonance in South Africa than here. They are two-thirds of the rap group Die Antwoord (the Answer), and their characters in “Chappie” are riffs on the personas they’ve created in their music and videos. As an actor, Ninja’s expressive capacity is limited to angry thuggishness and the occasional burst of guilt.

The duo also sport thick accents that often make the dialogue incomprehensible to American ears; and Charlto Copley, who provides the voice of Chappie, doesn’t fare much better.

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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).