Reel Entropy

Chappie is a truly inexcusable movie, the kind that would be laughed out of most entry-level film classes. The fact that this script and this director and these plot elements can get $50 million budget and wide release is staggering.

Writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s third nearly identical effort returns viewers to Johannesburg. Crime-ridden as ever, the police force have turned to automatons with limited artificial intelligence, real rabbit-looking things, to keep the peace. Ninja and Yo-landi Visser of the rap band Die Antwoord (these people) find themselves $20 million in the hole to local gang boss Hippo (Brandon Auret), and, being incredibly stupid, decide their best option is to get the remote to one of these robots from their designer, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel). They kidnap Wilson with a decommissioned police bot that he intended to try to run experimental full artificial intelligence software on. The rappers force him to activate the robot, creating Chappie (Sharlto Copley).

In a lot of ways, it’s more important to science fiction than any other genre to have a grounding in reality, and this movie has none in either the science or the fiction. Chappie’s life is necessarily brief — his chasis was decommissioned because the battery fused inside it, leaving him with five days of power and no way to recharge. His motivation is to get his consciousness into a new chasis, but Wilson, for some reason, says it can’t be done. Chappie searches for a way to convert his mind into a readable program while I and anyone else with a middle school understanding of computers scream at the screen, “It’s his hard drive! It’s in his fucking hard drive!”

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In a few years someone’s going to write a small novel on the narrative significance of this gambling scene. It’s major audience manipulation and works on more levels that I can really understand on just one viewing. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Focus is a truly unpredictable movie, one that lies to the audience as much as its con man main character lies to his marks.

It’s tough to say what the film is about as a whole. It’s really broken down into five acts, two of which each have their own individual three act divisions. First, Nicky Spurgeon (Will Smith) heads a large group of purse snatchers through New Orleans in the lead up to Super Bowl XLVIII. Then, after an extended, gripping but somehow irrelevant gambling sequence, they’re in Buenos Aires ripping off F1 racers.

It’s very much a romantic comedy about star-crossed pickpockets Spurgeon and Jess Barrett (Margot Robbie), but the romance is downplayed and most of the jokes are washboard flat. The appeal of the movie is in how well it manipulates the viewer.

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EVERYBODY IN THE MOSH PIT. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

If Kick-Ass was Kill Bill meets Superbad, Kingsman: The Secret Service is Deathproof meets Trading Places meets Octopussy. 

A wobbly adaptation of the six-issue Mark Millar limited series The Secret Service, the movie is a combination of willfully recycled rags-to-riches and super spy tropes. The main character, high school and military dropout Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton), lives with his mother (Samantha Womack), who is in a harshly abusive relationship with a local gang boss, when he is plucked from the slums by Galahad (Colin Firth), a member of an international spy agency conspicuously composed exclusively of British aristocrats who name themselves after knights of Arthurian legend. Unwin begins training to become the next Lancelot, while Internet magnate Richard Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) lurks in the background.

This movie’s got jokes, but it can’t escape an overall sloppy nature and artistic purpose. There’s a lot of meta commentary, particularly in a scene between Galahad and Valentine in which they reminisce on older, sillier spy movies. Professor James Arnold was named Mark Hamill in the comic, so his character is renamed and they brought in Mark Hamill the actor to play him. It’s playful, and there are a lot of little bits of fun in there, but they’re not pervasive enough to save a movie that set out to combine archetypes and does a poor job of it.

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