Film Review - Chappie

It is basically Neill Blomkamp does Robocop. 

So he takes the Robocop characters throws them into South Africa and cheeses up all the accents very much in his District 9 style. Then he gives everyone silly outfits and utterly stupid haircuts and we are off (although apparently without a script editor onboard). 

Spoilers from here.

Some people are going to argue about Robocop as a comparison but look at what we have underneath. A humanoid police robot with a brain that comes to life, decides it's own moral code is an improvement on the one it was given by its boss and sets out to prove it which involves fighting against authority figures trying to kill it to prevent their failed experiment from becoming public. And lets not even pretend that the battle robot is anything other than a straight ED-209 rip off.

The effects are pretty good for the most part. 

The plot holes are ridiculous. 

It takes them nearly a week to notice that the key is missing, and once they do the reaction to the most important top secret lock is missing is just to phone up the guy who took it and tell him to bring it back. And then he doesn't and they don't react at all. 

While being threatened for his life, Dev Patel's engineering robot genius claims there is no way to turn the robots off remotely, but 5 minutes later Hugh Jackman does exactly that to a single robot and then half an hour later he hacks into the supposedly secure system and turns them all off at once. 

They start downloading conscious minds in minutes (ok, I can give you artistic licence on that despite knowing the Lawrence Krauss calculations) and the humans being downloaded don't have any problem with waking up as robots?!

The police battle bot is designed to shoot down aircraft? And comes with cluster bombs?

The police battle bot rips a guy in half, shoots an unarmed man etc. but there is no problem with oversight?

It almost gets more stupid with every scene.


Overall, it is better than Jose Padhlia's Robocop or Fred Dekker's Robocop 3, not as good as Irvin Kershner's Robocop 2 and not even in the same class as Paul Verhoeven's original Robocop.

Rating 5 out of 10.