After debuting with the excellent District 9 and following it up with the less impressive but entertaining Elysium, director Neil Blomkamps third effort is a look at a dystopian Johannesburg where crime has reached critical levels and the police force cannot cope, so they are supplemented with human sized robots who bring more firepower to the table and while not totally invincible they can take a lot more damage.

Designer Deon (Dev Patel) is becoming worried that his new robots are being exploited for solely militaristic reasons instead of making the difference to society he has envisioned so he wants to upgrade the robots with an AI that will allow them to learn and feel emotions. This idea is shot down so he takes a damaged robot scheduled for destruction and works offline with this robot as a guinea pig. In the meantime this has caught the attention of Deons co-worker and rival Vincent (Hugh Jackman) who’s robots (very reminiscent of the ED-209 unit in the Robocop movie) were overlooked and he’s snooping around to find out what is going on. There’s also a gang of criminals who have got themselves into some serious trouble need to find a huge amount of cash in order to pay off a debt to a drug lord and these guys believe that Deon has the ability to switch off all the robots across the city so they decide a kidnapping is the way to go. Deon manages to convince them that he is unable to switch off the robots but given that he has the damaged robot with him they demand that he activates the robot in order to assist them with their task so Chappie is created.

Chappie has the intelligence of a child and needs to be taught everything from scratch, Deon and the female criminal Yo-landi act as the positive influences while the other two criminals Ninja & Yankie are the ying to the yang who persuade Chappie to do wrong and he is torn between these mixed signals his developing conscience is receiving and while this premise was promising it was all too brief before the movie reverted back to the action sequences and the good guy vs bad guys vs bad but in kind of good way guys. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been seen before, although watching Jackman play against type and looking like he was loving every minute of it, was reasonably entertaining.

Chappie is essentially a modernised Johnny 5 from Short Circuit with Blomkamp regular Sharlto Copley in voice mode and while he does well in making the big metallic child a sympathetic figure the rest of the film just doesn’t give you anything emotionally to support this theme. If you want a movie about the developmental ethics of AI then watch the brilliant Ex-Machina instead.

DJ Speaks Rating: 5 Out Of 10