'€œThank you for your cooperation'€: Chappie, channeling Robocop.

Moviegoers could be excused for thinking that Chappie '€” the latest film from Neill Blomkamp '€” would be a high-class action film with a thought provoking story, like the South Afircan director'€™s debut feature, the critically acclaimed District 9.

This time, however, Blomkamp has created a robotic thug drama plagued with narrative faults. Chappie boasts big ideas on drone ethics and the nature of consciousness, but its patchy storyline is disappointing.

The setting is 15 minutes into the future. In Johannesburg, police rely on, ahem, '€œrobocops'€ to clamp down on gangsters. Things go awry when a gang of small-time criminals (Ninja, YoLandi Visser and Jose Pablo Cantillo) kidnap robotics expert Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) to pull off a major heist.

At gunpoint, Deon agrees to install a new program that gives a robot named Chappie (Sharlto Copley) artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, another programmer, Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman, with an odd hairstyle), devises a sinister plan after his superrobot cop is rejected by his boss (Sigourney Weaver) in favor of Deon'€™s humanoid droid.

Nice haircut: Hugh Jackman sports an unusual hairstyle in the film.

Almost half of the film is dedicated to showing how Chappie develops an ability to think and feel under the motherly love of Yolandi (YoLandi) and the coercion of Ninja (Ninja), who impatiently prepare Chappie for a major robbery to help them get out of debt to an underworld boss.

While Chappie'€™s desire to become human and his relationship with his criminal '€œfamily'€ evokes Spielberg robotboy drama, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, this film fails in story department.

The drama in Chappie is unconvincing. It is hard to believe that a hard-line, egocentric criminal such as Ninja will suddenly put his life on the line for the machine and Deon.

It makes even less sense that Vincent'€™s sophisticated killing machine '€” named the ED209, in a nod to Paul Verhoeven'€™s Robocop '€” struggles to kill a pack of armed gangsters.

Despite a sloppy script, Blomkamp offers impressive special effects for depicting Chappie'€™s childlike mimicry and the robotversus-gangster battle actions '€” and also for a wacky scene where Chappie hijacks cars under pretense.

Dev Patel and Hugh Jackman, who have only limited screen time, manage to deliver robust performances. It is worth noting that Ninja and Yolandi, both from South African raprave group Die Antwoord, bring their eccentric personalities to the movie, despite their weak acting.

In District 9, Blomkamp offered us a compelling science-fiction action film that offered an apartheid allegory amid an alien invasion.

Chappie falls far short of that film, but is better than Blomkamp'€™s previous work, the dystopian scifi thriller Elysium in 2013, which also faced criticism for poor plotting.

Steely: Sigourney Weaver (right) stares down the robot.
However, in an interview with IGN, Blomkamp brushed off such concerns that Elysium fell short of District 9. '€œIt doesn'€™t affect me in the same way it affects a lot of other artists,'€ he said. '€œI'€™m willing to take big swings all the time until people won'€™t give me money.'€

Blomkamp made waves when he published his sketches and plans for an Alien sequel on Instagram earlier this year: Studio executives noticed, and the South African was given the green light to produce a fifth film in the wildly popular sciencefiction/horror franchise.

Let'€™s hope that Blomkamp can overcome Chappie'€™s narrative shortcomings when taking on Alien'€™s monstrous xenomorph.

Director Neill Blomkamp (right) talks with actor Sharlto Copley (left, back to camera) on set.

'€” Photos by Sony Pictures Classics
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Chappie

Running time: 120 min
Producer: Simon Kinberg
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Cinematography: Trent Opaloch
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver