Review: "Chappie"

I'm not going to write a full "Chappie" review, because I don't have time and the Yap duties are in Nick Rogers's capable hands. But a few thoughts.

It's a movie of profound inventiveness and profound silliness. The Chappie character, a childlike robot voiced and motion-captured by Sharlto Copley, is a tremendous creation. But just as he gets ill-used by the humans around him, so too does writer/director Neill Blomkamp take Chappie's journey to places that are ridiculous, with some where-does-the-soul-reside type of musings near the end that are laugh-out-loud awful.

Some weird secondary characters that distract and discombobulate the story. Start with Hugh Jackman as a robotics engineer who, for some reason, wears shorts, a mullet and a gun amidst his suited, nerdy colleagues. He's jealous because his ED-209 ripoff got overlooked in favor of the Chappie-style police droids.

Then there's the bizarre duo of Ninja and Yolandi, a real South African rap duo who got cast in the the movie as themselves. With their weird haircuts, tats and chirpy Afrikaans accents, they're like a pair of replicants who wandered in from "Blade Runner" after a stop in the white ghetto to pick up some cultural swag.

Bizarre, occasionally touching, a humanist story that gets hijacked by an action flick. After the brilliant debut of "District 9," Blomkamp is 0-for-2.