I had high hopes before I went to watch Chappie. Surely
Neill Blomkamp, the man who brought us District 9, would make South Africa
proud again with another great film. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Two
days after watching it, I’m still amazed at how kak Chappie was.
The premise of the film has so much potential that it’s hard
to believe that Neill BlomKak got it so incredibly wrong.
In the near future, South Africa employs the use of
specialised robots to assist the South African Police. These robocops, known as
Scouts, partner up with and protect their human partners very successfully,
much like the droids from the series Almost Human. The main reason for using
these droids in South Africa is because robots can’t be corrupted like the
human cops in South Africa.
Dev Patel plays a robot engineer who writes a programme to
give one of these Scouts artificial intelligence. Enter “Die Antwoord”, who
kidnap the robot and its maker and train the now self-aware robot to join their
gang.
So it’s a combination of RoboCop, Transendence and Almost
Human. Interesting, right? Wrong! It’s
as if Neill BlomKak hates the country he was born in.
South Africa is apparently so corrupt that we have to be
policed by robots. There is even a scene in the film where the robots are shut
down and the entire city of Johannesburg breaks out into a mass riot,
destroying the city. Neill BlomKak realises that our country is currently
policed by human police officers and we still function as a normal society,
right? Did I mention this film is set in the year 2016? That’s right, next
year.
The only thing more pathetic than the acting is Chappie’s
ridiculous coloured accent. There is absolutely no reason for this machine to
have an exaggerated Cape coloured accent and to have it be done by Sharlto
Copley is even more ludicrous. Why does he have this accent? There are no other
coloureds in the film for him to have learned it from. In fact, the only other
brown man in the movie is a Latino from America. That is correct, apparently
Neill BlomKak finds it more likely to have an American living in the Soweto
ghetto than to have a coloured there and the only coloured role in the movie
was a character created in a lab by Dev Patel.
Chappie shows the world a caricatured version of violent
Joburg. Nothing like the hard portrayals we’ve seen in films like Tsotsi or
Jerusalema. In Chappie, all the gangsters in Soweto are white and the kingpin
of downtown Soweto is a huge white man with a black accent. Seriously, Brandon Auret plays the role and he sounds like
how I imagine Jacob Zuma sounds when he’s talking dirty to one of his thirty
wives.
No one could save this
film. Any attempt at an actor trying to save this film was shot in the face by
poor directing, poor story development and Die Antwoord. Dev Patel tries to
deliver a heartfelt performance but is given so little to work with that it
ends up being bad comedy. Hugh Jackman tries to play the villain with
conviction but he walks around in that Aussie outback gear with his mullet from
the 80’s and you can’t help but wonder why he’s putting himself through this.
Chappie’s robot coloured
accent, Brandon Auret’s black accent and Hugh Jackman’s Aussie/Afrikaner
clothes and hair are kind of offensive and borderline racist.
Now that I’ve gotten that
off my chest, let me end this off with a quote from a friend of mine – “The
only thing worse than listening to Yolandie Visser’s voice, is staring at her
stupid face for two hours.”
That is all.
