Chappie (2015)

CHAPPIE  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Neill Blomkamp
    Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Yo-Landi Visser,
    Ninja, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver
Sometime in the future, in Neill Blomkamp's dystopian Johannesburg, a damaged police robot captured by a small gang of thieves becomes sentient, and has to adjust to a world where the 1% rule and most of humanity scrapes by in a violent slum. This has more of an escapist, comic-book feel to it than "District 9" and "Elysium", not that those movies weren't escapist, too. The metaphorical implications are more shaded and the emotional stakes, oddly enough, are higher, what with a cute robot and all. Sharlto Copley, without whom Blomkamp apparently couldn't make a movie, plays the robot, Chappie. Dev Patel, of the "Marigold Hotel" films, plays Chappie's creator, a nerd scientist working for a corporate overlord played by Sigourney Weaver. Hugh Jackman, with a terrible haircut and muscles left over from his last outing as Wolverine, plays a mercenary rival who's desperate to get his own giant monster robot online. Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser play the hoodlum couple who become Chappie's surrogate parents. (They also wrote most of the rap tunes on the soundtrack.) Blomkamp's vision of a grimy, ruined future remains distinctive. Nobody who's watched his other films would mistake "Chappie" for the work of anybody else.