Columbia PicturesAny movie with Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver, and a robot that's come to life has to be good...right?
You'd certainly think so, but not all the critics are sold on Chappie! The Neil Blomkamp-directed sci-fi flick takes place in the not-so-distant future, where pre-programmed robots act as the police force. When one of these droids (Chappie) is stolen and his data is reprogrammed, he takes on the ability to think for himself and experience typically human emotions for the first time.
Weaver's character as well as the mullet-rocking engineer Jackman plays are opposed to the idea of these empowered robots—Chappie included. Jackman reasons that "the problem with artificial intelligence is it's way too unpredictable," and because of this mindset, thinks humans need to put a stop to it before things get out of hand.
Chappie, who unlike his robot contemporaries is able to learn and develop feelings much like a child, becomes a target, but thankfully a few more understanding humans (played by Dev Patel and Die Antwood's Ninja and Yolandi Visser) want to help him. When the all-powerful anti-A.I. crew discover this, though, a fiery, futuristic battle breaks out.
For some, like the Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy, Chappie plays out as "predictable." In a rather harsh review, he summed up the film's bottom line as, Chappie, "As in crappy."
Variety's Justin Chang agreed, calling Chappie a "clunky and crappy" movie, and noting its main, robotic character is "so frankly unappealing [that] he almost makes Jar-Jar Binks [of Star Wars] seem like tolerable company by comparison."
In a piece for Wired.com, Eric Thurm admitted the film had its peculiarities, but as he noted, "It has a giant robot fight and completely earnest scenes of an engineer trying to teach a robot to paint. The fact that it exists at all is something of a miracle."
Metro's Matt Prigge agreed, writing that while the film is "sloppy, even for Neill Blomkamp [who also directed District 9 and Elysium," it's also "oddly noble."
"It may be a junkyard construction of other people's movies—and it's no coincidence that Blomkamp likes to set his films amidst actual junk—but it goes off on its own path, eventually," he writes.
There were others, still, who thought the good outweighed the bad. Time Out's Tom Huddleston noted that while "Chappie the film isn't so perfect," it turns out to be a "hugely entertaining oddity" that "could never be mistaken for the work of any other filmmaker" than Blomkamp.
Chappie hits theaters Friday.