Chappie (2015)

So, I have a confession to make: I never much liked Neill Blomkamp's 2009 fable District 9. There are those who'd argue that this makes me a racist; me, I think that anybody who requires that level of heavy-handed preaching to appreciate the fact that apartheid was a Very Bad Thing might want to examine their own prejudices before they go condemning others. I was left feeling as though Blomkamp had definitely wanted to make some grubbily violent sci-fi but had accidentally picked up the script for a pre-school TV programme about the importance of being nice to people and walking a mile in their shoes, and while it all seemed to make sense at first it soon became patronising on a level that started out as irritating but eventually landed up outright surreal.

This, then, along with some moderately shocking reviews, is why I wasn't in any great hurry to see Chappie. I've not been having much luck with films this Christmas, though (possibly because I've been having such great luck at falling asleep) and after the opening ten minutes of Open Season I knew I couldn't rely on the TV to bring me what I needed. At this time of year, I like my movies sentimental but subversive, and nasty without being too unremittingly bleak. At a pinch, however, I'll cheerfully settle for anything that 1) isn't a cartoon and 2) doesn't feature actors that look as though they've been airbrushed. 

The characters in Chappie definitely don't look as though they've been airbrushed, although they might conceivably have taken a few shots from a passing sandblaster. There's a few faces you might recognise, in any case - Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel as a kindly young scientist, and Hugh Jackman as the sort of sadistically violent bastard that comes as standard with every film that centres around an amiable robot. 

Said robot, the titular Chappie, is played - in vocal and motion capture form - by Sharlto Copley, in what has to be one of the strongest performances I've seen all year. There's nothing new about the trope of a powerful robot with the mind of a child, but Copley is given the space to lay himself bare and display a vulnerability that's always endearing and occasionally flat-out heartbreaking. He receives able support in this from South African rappers Ninja and Yo-Landi as a couple of low-rent gangsters, each of whom have very distinct ideas about how their robotic child should be reared and for what eventual purpose. Despite the guns and the bluster, however, they prove almost as naive as Chappie himself, and things inevitably start to go very badly wrong.

It's at this point that you'd assume that the film would eventually culminate in a Tarantinoesque bloodbath, but you'd only be partly right. Blomkamp has far too much faith in his characters to blow it all by going all Shakespearean in the final act. He manages to find a real humanity in his grubby, scarred protagonists, and I'm not sure I can remember the last time I found myself rooting so hard for a bunch of figments of somebody else's imagination*. What we're left with instead, in fact (spoiler) is something more positive and tender than I could ever have hoped for.

People may tell you that Chappie fails to see the bigger picture, and they're probably right - it doesn't pose many questions about the kind of leadership that results in the sort of near-future dystopia in which the movie is set, and doesn't confront the sort of issues Blomkamp dealt with in District 9 and Elysium. That said, it's an absolutely cracking character piece with charm in spades and a surprising amount of emotional heft - could anybody really ask for a better Christmas present than that?


_{*Okay, I can, it was yesterday, it was The Doctor and River Song and I'd have given half my Christmas dinner if it would've guaranteed them the happy ending they both so richly deserve.}