Chappie Review

Neill Blomkamp keeps making the same film, and this is the version where the seams show. The robot itself is the best thing here: Weta's Chappie is a superb piece of animation built on Sharlto Copley's motion capture, and the early scenes of a newborn intelligence learning to flinch have real tenderness. Everything around it is chaos.

Ninja and Yolandi Visser of Die Antwoord play characters named after themselves, and while their flat, hostile amateurism sometimes reads as authenticity, mostly it is two musicians saying lines. Hugh Jackman, in a mullet and rugby shorts, plays a defence engineer who turns jealous, devout and homicidal inside four scenes, a villain with no interior at all.

Sigourney Weaver is given nothing to do but approve budgets. The tonal swings are violent: a childlike machine is taught to stab people for laughs, then the same film wants tears over a consciousness transfer. Trent Opaloch shoots Johannesburg with the grimy energy he brought to District 9, and the Moose is a genuinely nasty piece of hardware. The ending, which solves death with a USB cable, throws away whatever the preceding two hours were asking.