*Chappie: An Extremely Crappie Mess
I’ve
made three very bad decisions in my life: I
joined the Marine Corps during the Vietnam era, I let the love of my life
walk out the door and didn't even try to stop her, and I allowed my friend, David, talk
me into seeing the movie Chappie.
I
knew it wasn’t a good idea to go see Chappie, I knew it. It was March and the
month of March is notorious for puking out the worst movies of the year. Why?
Well, because March is the month right before the summer movie season gets
started, and it’s always been the opportune time for production companies to
dump their crappy, low budget flicks on the public. This horrendous piece of
sci-fi fluff, Chappie, seems to have been thrown together quickly without much
care for production quality; and it rips-off storylines/ideas from older, more
successful sci-fi films (Robo Cop {1987} and I, Robot {2004} for example), and
the bigger budgeted Avenger movie, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, that’s to be
released later on this summer.
There’s
nothing positive I can say about Chappie. It’s advertised as being a movie about
the birth of artificial intelligence (AI) but it’s so badly produced that it
turns out to be a movie about . . . well, nothing much at all. Yeah, sure, it
sort of mentions the idea of artificial intelligence but doesn’t really examine
the creation or development of artificial life. The problem with this film is
that it pays lip service to about every social issue you can think of
(corporate corruption, child abuse, urban crime, etc.) but never explores any
idea in depth. It’s impossible to review this movie seriously because the director/writers didn’t seem to care at all
about making a seriously good movie.
Unfortunately,
Chappie tries to be a funny but turns out to be a hateful and extremely condescending
mess. There are elongated scenes where Chappie’s “adopted father” teaches him
how to be all “Gangsta,” how to cuss and to walk bad-ass and . . . oh, and how
to pull off a carjack. Yep, that’s right, the maker of this film thinks there’s
something humorous about a cute, robot “Gangsta” ripping the doors off of cars,
waving a gun in the faces of terrified drivers, and then grabbing them up and flinging
them to the ground. Yeah, ha-ha, funny.
And
the acting? Sigourney Weaver, Hugh Jackman, Dev Patel what the hell were you
guys thinking? You were texting it in. All three should be arrested by SAG and
sentenced to a hundred and twenty days of community theatre! Not one actor in
this movie connects with the materiel, each other or the audience. I can
forgive Yolandi Visser and Watkin Tudor Jones—oh, forgive me, again, I mean
Ninja—for creating two of the most uninteresting characters in the history of forever.
But you Ripley, Wolverine, and Dude-From-The-Newsroom, you guys should know
better.
*My
friend, Michael, took offense at my being so hard on this movie that he liked. So,
I invite Koo to write a review for this blog page and I will post it here so my
readers (Yeah both of you) can make up your own mind! {smiles}
