CHAPPiE made me appreciate Sharlto Copley's performance in Elysium (2013) so much more. As C.M. Kruger, Copley fucking owns his campy, obscenely over-the-top repulsiveness; and is a relieving distraction from the film's self-seriousness. In CHAPPiE, Neil Blomkamp tries to recreate this with every single antagonist. First it's the South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord, making their film debut, as two tweeker criminals; and their cartoonishness is exhausting. Then there is Hugh Jack as a former-soldier-now-scientist who has made a war robot no one wants to use. His performance can be broken down into three parts: Mad Jackman, Madder Jackman, Maddest Jackman. And in a single film he strives to make up for all of the roles that didn't allow him to speak in his Australian accent. Then, just in case we didn't get the subtlety, he brings in Brandon Auret to play a pseudo-crime lord constantly screaming incomprehensible gibberish (to the point where subtitles were deemed needed). And all each of these characters amount to is a mirage of embarrassing impressions of Copley's crazed brilliance.
Blomkamp's narrative structure and tonal balance have regressed with each of his films. He strives for a RoboCop-esque balance of biting satire and frightening socio-political relevancy, but mistakes satire with loud, in-your-face obscenity, and stints of ironic violence. The sad thing is, that if he wouldn't take himself so seriously and would embrace the ridiculousness of his brand of social commentary, he has the hyper-violent, explosively energetic style that Paul Verhoeven mastered with RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997). Unfortunately, Blomkamp wants to be righteously profound AND funny, but gets caught between preaching undeveloped ideas and jarring the audience with off-putting jumps of tone.
Now, it's time to nit-pick. Potential spoilers follow.
CHAPPiE should've started where it ended. The idea of the consciousness of a human being transferred into the body of a robot is equally interesting and ridiculous. A perfect setup for a subversive satire. Instead the film focuses on a bare-bones artificial intelligence narrative. The character of Chappie's AI is hyped as progressing much faster than a normal human. Yet he starts at the stage of an infant, and never progresses beyond childhood. It's easy to sympathize with him, he's innocent and talks cutely in the 3rd person. But even when he's experienced the horrors of the world and essentially becomes the hero, he still hasn't progressed significantly. It seems like keeping him as a virtual child was used as a means to justify him coming in and out of the action whenever convenient.
The film's other major flaw is grossly underusing the MOOSE, the war robot created by Jackman's soldier-scientist. The most on-the-nose RoboCop reference, the MOOSE is a more massive, less insect-like version of the ED-209. And for a solid 20 minutes, it single-handedly makes the film exciting. Its debut action scene appearance sees it literally tear a character in half. Then it progresses to blow shit up.
My theory is that there's at least another 20 minutes of MOOSE footage that was trashed because Jackman's performance was so bad that they had to use as little of him as possible. The mullet and accent weren't enough, they had to also have him constantly wearing cargo shorts. And a final note, Dev Patel committed to his "act wimpy but walk tough" performance so much that I'm worried he plans on making this a phase.
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