In Neill Blomkamp’s latest, a robot learns to feel, and also to call itself “gangsta number one.”
Columbia Pictures
District 9 director Neill Blomkamp could very well have another good movie in him. Maybe it'll be the upcoming installment of the Alien franchise he nabbed thanks to Instagram, but one thing's for sure: It isn't Chappie, the robot-learns-to-feel drama-cum-action movie he adapted from a two-minute short he made over a decade ago. Messy and maddening, Chappie, which is now in theaters, is filled with utterly bewildering choices. Here are five of the worst.
1. Rap-rave group Die Antwoord plays a major role.
Columbia Pictures
Ninja and Yolandi Visser (better known as Die Antwoord) are the human stars of Chappie — more than Hugh Jackman, more than Sigourney Weaver, and on par with Dev Patel, who plays the creator of the eponymous robot. The high-concept, performance-art-as-alt-hip-hop group appears as fictionalized versions of their stage personas, and their music's embedded throughout Chappie, which rolls credits over "Enter The Ninja." Ninja and Visser's distinctive looks (the tats, the hair, the eyebrows, etc.) and general theatricality have caught the eye of filmmakers before — David Fincher considered casting Visser as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, while Blomkamp, who is also South African, wanted Ninja for the Matt Damon role in Elysium .
But the pair, playing dim bulb gangsters living in a hipster lair in Soweto, torpedo the movie whenever they're on screen. Their cartoonish swagger and homage to/parody and appropriation of a particular slice of lower class South African subculture may work within the context of their act, but it doesn't at all match the earnestness of the rest of the movie. There's no way to take them seriously, as criminals or as surrogate parents to Chappie, whether reading him picture books or teaching him how to walk like a gangster. It's not unlike watching a gritty serial killer movie in which the baddies are revealed to be Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope from Insane Clown Posse. By the time Ninja gets around to decking out Chappie in spray paint and gold chains ("I've got blings!" the robot exclaims), it's impossible to tell, or care, what's meant to be in air quotes.
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