Chappie

RATING: B

We've seen our fair share of artificial intelligence movies over the years. Most of them have been pretty good. It's a subgenre that lends itself to a lot of ideas and threads that can be used--even if there's only a few different ways the whole story ends. I haven't gotten tired of it yet myself. 

This particular one starts with the backdrop of there being a robotic police force in South Africa (but *only* in South Africa, for some reason). Of course they're "AI's" of sorts, but they're more limited--made to follow orders and carry out objectives. And then they go to the idea of building a fully sentient AI into one of those "scouts." And this one, named Chappie, starts out like a child, having to learn things both on its own and from its maker (and other people). Of course, there are forces out there that either want to use Chappie for their own purposes... or just want him destroyed. Tough world for what basically amounts to a "child robot" to be in. 

What the marketing didn't really show you is that Chappie isn't actually "trained" by his actual "maker" a whole lot. He is brought into the world to be used by a small group of gangsters--two of whom are played by members of a real-life rap outfit, for some reason. He is supposed to become "the illest gangsta on the block," among other things. For a well-meaning but naive and easily influenced child-like AI, that's ultimately not a good thing. 

This is a somewhat conflicting movie. There's some very interesting material here for sure. What much of the movie basically amounts to is a quick look at a more ghetto (or "gangsta") version of life through the lens of a confused AI. This does lead to some ridiculousness due to the often over-the-top silliness of the gangsters, and the rather poor acting of the rap duo that "stars" in the movie. 

Despite that, the movie does get us to care about Chappie himself a fair amount. The poor guy goes through a lot in this movie, and although we're not really sure how fast he "ages" in his mind relative to humans, we're still led to believe that he's basically a "child AI." And he gets a rough glance at some of humanity's shortcomings. A key memorable point has an enraged Chappie asking, "Why do you humans always do this? Why do you lie?!" His tale is almost sort of a tragic one--or at least that's how it set up to be for most of the movie. Then the crazy (but quite exciting) final act happens, and when the climactic confrontation is over, we're left with a change in theme and tone for the final 10-15 minutes--which turns out quite interesting and a little alarming, but it is still quite a shift from what we've been given for most of the movie. 

That's part of the issue here, beyond some of the more annoying acting and off-tone silliness. At times it seems like the movie's trying to do a little too much. It ranges from being WALL-E-like with regard to the robot's curiosity in things, to also being a tragic discovery of humanity's shortcomings and then also dealing with life and death--and how that affects Chappie (among other things which I won't spoil). There's almost too much stuff explored in just 2 hours. They probably should have either tried to limit themselves a bit, or the movie should have been longer. (But we all know how little patience people have for *that* nowadays--150 minutes is too long now, apparently.)

Chappie's a pretty interesting and often-exciting movie, but also a little annoying at times. While I came away overall enjoying the final product, it was still kind of difficult to think back later and make full sense of what I had seen. And man, are those gangsters annoying. Chappie succeeds in a fair amount of respects, but also kind of falls apart in others and you can't help but feel it could've been more.