Chappie is the latest film from South African Director Neil Blomkamp, who’s given us the films District 9 and Elysium, District 9 was a film about Racism, whereas Elysium was about the 1%-ers living the literal high life in a space station. The social commentary of Chappie is not so obvious. This film is about a hard sci-fi concept as it might apply to the real world.

In the near future, crime is rampant in Detroit Johannesburg, South Africa. The OCP Tetravaal Corporation has experimented with robotic police officers to keep the peace. The parallels to the movie Robocop are there, however, Chappie adds elements from Short Circuit into the mix. Current it-actor Dev Patel plays Deon, inventor of the robotic police force, who’s research has continued into the area of Artificial Intelligence. Tetravaal’s CEO Michelle (Sigourney Weaver) orders him to stop the project and just focus on their highly effective Robotic Officers instead. Determined, he steals a unit scheduled to be destroyed, and intends to load his new software into it, since it was too damaged to repair and return to active service.

Meanwhile, a small group of mid-level criminals owes a lot of money to the local gang kingpin, Hippo, and they need it fast. They figure that if they can hack the robots, they can steal what they need. Ninja and Yo-landi (played by rap-trance stars Ninja and Yo-Landi of the group Die Antwoord [The Answer]), kidnap Deon to force him to provide a way for them to hack the robots. They captured him as he was making off with the aforementioned broken robot, and Deon convinces them he’ll do what he can to help, so he installs his AI program into the robot, which is dubbed Chappie. While very much paralleling the early life of Johnny 5 and his growth, Chappie’s development seems more realistic, as Yo-Landi treats Chappie like a child, and Ninja introduces him to the reality of their existence.

Meanwhile, Deon’s rival at the company, Vincent (Hugh Jackman), wants to see the robots fail, as he has been developing a similar protection device, ED-209 MOOSE, but MOOSE would be directly controlled by humans, similar to how the military controls drones now. His funding’s been cut several times, and, well, that’s where the fun begins.

There are some odd choices made in how this film plays out. For one, I found South Africans’ dialect hard to follow, sometimes. Blomkamp must’ve agreed, because he inserted Subtitles for Hippo’s words, but no one else’s. Maybe the theater’s sound system wasn’t the greatest, because I had to strain to hear some of the dialogue properly. There were some other shortcuts taken in order to streamline the movie, but they were more technical, and would never have happened if Tetravaal was a real company and had better physical security. IMO, Chappie’s learning ability progressed too rapidly, too. Those concerns were bypassed to allow the story to flow better, and rightfully so.

This was an enjoyable movie. The story never really dragged, and the third act pulled it all together. It was an interesting take on the concept of AI, and how such an intelligence would accept a not-so-legal lifestyle. There is physical violence in the film, and several gun battles. I found it odd that there were several parents had brought their preteen children to the theater, however, the trailers for the film do not really describe the kind of story it is.

I suspect it will disappear from theaters soon, because the number of theaters showing it on a full schedule were fewer than I’d expect.