Thriller Archives - Page 18 of 67

Irrational Man (2015)

July 24, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jamie Blackley, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s an odd, mean little movie kicking around in Irrational Man, if you can sift past the tired bromides about love and continental philosophy to find it. The fifty-first feature from the not-so-venerable Woody Allen reads like a work of sloppy automatic writing given some surprisingly rich shading by an alert, unpredictable performance from Joaquin Phoenix and the steady hand of Allen the director, who once again proves he’s as efficient at handling the near-screwball mechanics and black pitch of crime pictures as he is inept at romantic comedies. A nominal May-December romance about an aging fusspot granted a new lease on life by a twentysomething sunflower, Irrational Man is a far more disquieting film than its marketing would suggest–if not a confession of the director’s real-life pathologies, then one of the most incisive profiles of a sociopath ever tucked into the back of a dark comedy.

Southpaw (2015)

July 23, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Kurt Sutter
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw TV-writer Kurt Sutter breaks into feature-screenwriting by amalgamating Taxi Driver with Raging Bull in a movie that has the distinction of being not only the second film of 2015 with Fiddy Cent in it for some inexplicable reason, but also the second film that Jake Gyllenhaal shares with a little slow-motion girl on a trampoline. Southpaw has the distinction, too, of being the second picture in a row following Nightcrawler that is absolutely not the equal of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s performance in it. Antoine Fuqua’s latest is a rote, by-the-numbers sports melodrama that ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions, meaning that although it’s shooting for Rocky and Requiem for a Heavyweight, it ends up as Real Steel. It wants to be gritty like the American ’70s, see, but if Disney made ultra-violent boxing movies, this is exactly what they’d be like: dead mother and all. The real wonder of it all is that Fuqua manages to match every one of Sutter’s overused sports clichés with an overused Scorsese homage. That’s the real toe-to-toe slugfest, sports fans.

It Follows (2015) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 13, 2015****/****, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

The Gunman (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 7, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Don McPherson, Pete Travis, Sean Penn, based on the novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
directed by Pierre Morel

by Bill Chambers Sean Penn seems like the last guy who would walk into his agent’s office and say, “Give me the Liam Neeson™,” because his work doesn’t operate on that kind of cynicism. Even I Am Sam, in which he courts an Oscar by playing mentally-challenged, fits neatly into a career whose primary auteurist concern has been the sanctity and fragility of daughters’ lives (see also: The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, 21 Grams, and Mystic River). So it’s reassuring, sort of, to see him use The Gunman as a pulpit for his humanitarian concerns (presuming I’ve correctly extrapolated the political firebrand’s credited contribution to the screenplay), but there is a disappointing transparency to the character, as if he’s afraid that reinventing himself too much in the Neeson mold will reveal, God forbid, a desire to stay popular in a profession he has threatened to quit numerous times. In The Gunman, one of our most transformative actors–a guy who as recently as 2011 turned himself into the spitting image of The Cure‘s Robert Smith and affected a childlike drawl for the length of a feature–comports himself with a tedious self-seriousness, makes time to surf, and smokes way too much to be a credible action hero. He’s Sean Penn in all but name, and he’s kind of a drag.

Terminator Genisys (2015)

July 1, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Byung-hun Lee
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier
directed by Alan Taylor

by Walter Chaw Once you come to terms with the fact that there's no internal logic to it (that it's without external logic is a given), once you've accepted that the only way to enjoy something like Terminator Genisys (hereafter T5) is at a great distance, through multiple irony filters and possibly a coma, T5 is still largely unwatchable. Its screenplay is one of those rare disasters generally reserved for a Syfy Channel Original, and indeed, the whole thing plays like the fourth sequel to Sharknado rather than the fourth sequel to James Cameron's The Terminator, which for some reason it replicates shot-for-shot in a series of 1984-set sequences. The premise, see, is that this time around, a Terminator has been sent for Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), mother of future resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) and somewhere-in-time consort of heroic soldier Kyle Reese (Jai-Zzzzzzzzzz). What this means is that when Kyle gets sent back into the Cameron film, Sarah is already a badass, has a pet Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) she calls "Pops," and has an adversary in a liquid T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun). I still don't understand how the T-1000 time travels because the rules in this universe are that nothing metal can go through the stargate without a flesh covering. Something else that doesn't make sense, T5 also has a call-out to Chris Marker's La Jetée.

Miami Blues (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

June 23, 20151990s, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nora Dunn
screenplay by George Armitage, based on the novel by Charles Willeford
directed by George Armitage

by Jefferson Robbins Remember when handheld camera was a technique deployed to signal disorientation, estrangement, and vulnerability and not simply “the way we shoot movies now”? In George Armitage’s Miami Blues, the otherwise-steady camera first comes unhinged when ex-con Frederick “Junior” Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin) orders newly-requisitioned hooker Pepper (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to roll over on her belly, presumably so he can employ her the way male prisoners employ each other sexually. He can’t, though, because there’s something different there, and an afternoon’s purchased pleasure becomes an affair. Armitage’s use of the camera is a punctuation, a chapter break in Junior’s story, reassuring us that while Junior is malevolent and unpredictable, Pepper won’t immediately meet the same fate as the Hare Krishna that Junior (kind of accidentally) murdered an hour before. Still, you should probably worry for her.

Run All Night (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 15, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Runallnightbd1

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It’s a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou’s underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What’s most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he’d go back to doing something worthy of him.

New Year’s Evil (1980) – Blu-ray Disc

June 14, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace, Grant Cramer
screenplay by Leonard Neubauer
directed by Emmett Alston

by Bryant Frazer Every 1980s slasher movie needed a gimmick, and New Year’s Evil has two: a Halloween-inspired holiday tie-in and a youth-culture exploitation angle. A Hollywood-based serial killer promises to murder a victim at the stroke of midnight in each of the four continental U.S. time zones, announcing his intentions by calling “Hollywood Hotline”, a New Year’s Eve countdown TV show hosted by Roz Kelly (the erstwhile Pinky Tuscadero on “Happy Days”) that features live performances by punkish new wave acts. The results are surprisingly watchable. The psycho-killer story is actually a bit twisty as these things go, with a mid-film reversal of fortune aiming to give audiences a rooting interest in the villain. And though the bands on screen (Shadow and Made in Japan) seem to be employed mainly to help pad out the film’s 86-minute running time, their proto-Guns N’ Roses sounds are not entirely disagreeable.

Jurassic World (2015)

June 11, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ty Simpkins
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw Jurassic World is Dada. It is anti-art, anti-sense–wilfully, defiantly, some would say exuberantly, meaningless. In its feckless anarchy, find mute rebellion against narrative convention. You didn’t come for the story, it says, you came for the set-ups and pay-offs. It’s history’s most expensive porno: broad characters in familiar situations and then the fucking and the money shot. There’s a scene in the first third where raptor-wrangler Dirk, or is it Chet? Shane? No, wait…Owen (Chris Pratt), yeah, Owen, tells uptight eventual conquest Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) that his raptors are driven by eating, hunting, and *grunt–fist-push–grunt*, and surely Claire must be motivated by at least…one…of those things. Cue the throbbing bass and dirty guitar. There are also constant call-outs to the first film, old enough now to be held as totem to a generation of people wanting to recapture that initial experience. Jurassic Park was similarly a bad movie with great set-pieces; what time has taught us is that it hardly even matters if these films have human actors in them as long as they don’t waste too much time on them. It’s fantasy gratification, and the fantasy it’s trying to gratify is that you can lose your virginity again.

Hungry Hearts (2015)

June 4, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Thriller

**/****
starring Adam Driver, Alba Rohrwacher, Roberta Maxwell
written and directed by Saverio Costanzo

by Walter Chaw Not the sequel to the Bruce Springsteen song I was hoping for, Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts is instead the moment at which I completely understand the appeal of Adam Driver. He’s Jude; one night, after a particularly unfortunate biological episode, he meets-cute peculiar Mina (Alba Rohrwacher), who’s forced to suffer the olfactory fallout with him. They move in together. She gets pregnant, and later we think back on the moment of conception with something like dread. Mina becomes increasingly difficult. She becomes the acolyte of various new-age schemes and trends, finding gurus to follow in the garbage she reads while their son fails to grow. Jude, frantic, sneaks away three times a day on various pretexts to feed his son meat. He’s afraid the boy will die. One night, Mina wakes Jude, in a scene Costanzo shoots with a fish-eye lens, and says, “My son threw up meat. Do you know anything about this?”–and then she shrinks out of frame like that giant fish in that one Faulkner story about the bear. Hungry Hearts is a bit of the Naturalism of the Faulkner. It’s a bit of the Gothic, too.

Mad Max (1979) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 31, 20151970s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Steve Bisley, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by James McCausland and George Miller
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw George Miller’s films are warnings against dehumanization, against valuing machineries over intuition and emotions. It’s what drives the Holocaust parable at the heart of his masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City; what made him the perfect match for Twilight Zone: The Movie‘s remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Though terms like “visionary” and “auteur” are as overused as they are misused, Miller is both. He’s a rarity in the modern conversation: an aging director who shows no signs of a slackening energy or diminished focus. See also in Miller’s work an unusual sensitivity to physical deformity set up against a righteous offense at spiritual blight. (He began his career as a trauma physician.) His films seek to do no harm, but sometimes you need to cut out some healthy tissue to get at the disease. All of it–the work as a doctor, the scrappiness, the impulsiveness that led to his strapping an airplane jet on a car and hoping no one would die (no one did)–is part of a creation mythology for Miller that’s as fulsome as Herzog’s. Testament to Miller’s enduring influence and outsider status: he’s a sainted figure, for good reason.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

May 14, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw The best parts of Mad Max: Fury Road (hereafter Fury Road) are, as it happens, those that are most like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The parts about civilization rising from the ruins of an atomic war; the parts about misplaced hope and how unlikely alliances can sometimes speak to the human tendency towards faith and the possibility of eternity. The series was always about the myth of the lone hero, striding into whatever situation and facilitating a return to a prelapsarian (pre-poc-y-clypse?) state before disappearing again. Shane, for instance, where a child’s development–or in the case of Thunderdome, a great many children’s development–has been mythologized as the intervention of a mysterious stranger who appears from nowhere and returns there. Max is a metaphor. For courage, heart, intelligence, the yearning for home; he touches in turn each of The Wizard of Oz‘s quartet of self-actualization while keeping the Wizard behind the curtain. If there’s a specific modern mythology to which this series most obviously hews, it’s the Arthur myth, and in Thunderdome, when asked if he’s the return of the fabled Captain Walker, Max responds that he isn’t. But we know that he is.

The Boy Next Door (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 3, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Thriller

Boynextdoor1

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Guzman, John Corbett, Kristin Chenoweth
screenplay by Barbara Curry
directed by Rob Cohen

by Bill Chambers Every once in a while, the absence of Roger Ebert becomes piercingly clear–like when J-Lo is gifted with a “first edition” of The Iliad in The Boy Next Door, a moment of Hollywood illiteracy so quintessential that it might’ve once seemed contrived for the sake of an Ebert quip. But whether or not the filmmakers realized how inapt their choice of Homer was (screenwriter Barbara Curry has disavowed any credit), this is an effective bit of characterization. The gifter is the titular boy next door, Noah (Ryan Guzman); the giftee is Jennifer Lopez’s Mrs. Claire Petersen, an English teacher at his new school. Noah, although capable of bluffing his way through a conversation about Classics, can’t be expected to know the publishing history of The Iliad–it’s a nice, antiquey copy he thought would impress her, though he plays it cool, claiming he found it at a yard sale when he probably shoplifted it from a vintage bookstore. Claire should correct him, given her vocation, but why spoil a thoughtful gesture? And besides, that sort of pedantry bespeaks age, ultimately, and the generation gap between them is not something she wants underscored, because she’s a middle-aged single mother enjoying the attentions of a younger man. Far from being the picture’s nadir, it’s really as elegant as its writing ever gets.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

April 29, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw It’s pointless to recap this edition of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s endless cycling through decades of storylines, melodramas, loves and blood feuds, deaths and resurrections–this Möbius strip of punching and quipping and punching and quipping and punching and… It’s an ouroborosian worm devouring itself into eternity, if you let it, and the sanction that a few billion dollars confers suggests it’ll keep devouring itself for a while longer. Still, it’s a cripplingly expensive endeavour, meaning that surprise and individuality are crushed in its logarithmic march towards solvency–and the human collateral caught in its gears is the tragedy that the place we get to see Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson (the two best, most interesting actors in the United States right now) share an emotionally complex scene is in this vacuous light show-cum-cash register, Avengers: Age of Ultron (hereafter Avengers II). You could say that at least it happened–you could also say that you wish it had happened in a vehicle that actually cared about them, and it wouldn’t be too much to ask.

StageFright (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

April 15, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Italy, Thriller

Deliria
StageFright: Aquarius
Bloody Bird
***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Robert Gligorov, John Morghen
screenplay by George Eastman
directed by Michele Soavi

by Walter Chaw After years spent working alongside such luminaries as Joe D’Amato, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento, Michele Soavi made his directorial debut with 1987’s StageFright (onscreen title: StageFright: Aquarius)–not an update of Hitchcock’s underestimated Jane Wyman vehicle, but a carrying of the giallo torch from one generation ostensibly into the next. For the uninitiated, giallo, when done right, is a perpetual-motion machine that runs off its own mysterious energy. Taking its name from the yellow covers of lurid Italian paperbacks, films in this genre split, broadly, into two sub-categories: the ones that give a passing nod to ratiocination; and the ones that don’t bother to make any rational sense at all. StageFright is of the latter school, aligning it with stuff like Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy over something like his Tenebrae (on which Soavi served as second assistant director). Sense is antithetical to StageFright. It’s a vehicle for atmosphere and delivers it in spades.

Blacula (1972)/Scream Blacula Scream (1973) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

April 7, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire

Blacula1

BLACULA
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring William Marshall, Denise Nicholas, Vonetta McGee, Charles Macaulay
screenplay by Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig
directed by William Crain

SCREAM BLACULA SCREAM
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring William Marshall, Don Mitchell, Pam Grier, Richard Lawson
screenplay by Joan Torres & Raymond Koenig and Maurice Jules
directed by Bob Kelljan

by Bryant Frazer It takes some nerve to turn an exploitative, possibly racist script treatment from a low-budget movie-manufacturing plant like Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American Independent Pictures (AIP) into a tragic meditation on the legacy of slavery in contemporary urban society, but that’s what director William Crain and actor William Marshall damn near pulled off with Blacula. Originally conceived as a blaxploitation programmer with the ersatz jive-talking title Count Brown Is in Town, the project that would become Blacula took on some gravity when Crain cast Marshall, a trained Shakespearean actor, in the title role. Marshall insisted on alterations to the script that gave the film a subtext: he would play the lead as an 18^th-century African noble who, while touring Europe in an attempt to persuade the aristocracy to oppose the slave trade, was turned into a vampire and imprisoned for more than 100 years by the rabidly racist Count Dracula. In Marshall’s imagining of the story, it was Dracula who, seeking to demean the uppity foreigner, saddled him with the dismissive, derivative moniker Blacula.

Don’t Look Now (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 5, 2015****/****, 1970s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania
screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is about looking, about ways of seeing and layers of understanding. It’s about memory and its intrusion into and influence on current states of being. It’s about the impossibility of faith or love or human relationships to illuminate truth; or it’s about how faith and love and human relationships are the only truth. It shows images out of order, presenting them in ways that will only make sense once the gestalt in which the images exist becomes clear. In every way, Don’t Look Now is designed for multiple viewings. The film warns that a life spent unexamined will end brutally and nonsensically. Without context, there is nothing, but context is nigh impossible before the end. It’s something William Carlos Williams would understand.

Furious 7 (2015)

April 3, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

Furious Seven
**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jason Statham, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw There’s a death culture surrounding car enthusiasts. Whereas in football if a player dies, their memorabilia tends to go dormant, in NASCAR, the sport’s victims are elevated to sainted martyr: Their bits and pieces become as holy relics, sacrifices to thundering machine gods. Predictably, then, Furious 7 (hereafter F7) will enjoy a lavish critical and popular processional, as freshly-dead Paul Walker (the worst semi-successful American actor, living or deceased) haunts every frame with either his digital ghost or his patented expressionless reaction shots. Finished with a combination of camera trickery, CGI grafts, and Walker’s brothers as ghoulish body-doubles, F7 if nothing else proves that Walker is distractingly lifeless in every scenario, but nobly so in this one.

Run All Night (2015)

March 14, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Chappie (2015) + Unfinished Business (2015)

March 8, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

CHAPPIE
*/****
starring Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Sigourney Weaver, Hugh Jackman
screenplay by Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell
directed by Neill Blomkamp

UNFINISHED BUSINESS
**/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco, James Marsden
screenplay by Steven Conrad
directed by Ken Scott

by Walter Chaw The schadenfreude winner of the week is Neill Blomkamp’s benighted trainwreck of a fanfic reel Chappie, which presents a horrific tale of how a child raised by art-rap band Die Antwoord would grow to be this unholy Frankenstein of Sharlto Copley and Jar Jar Binks and Gorillaz and a mechanical rabbit. It’s a mess. The completion of the Short Circuit trilogy no one was asking for, it’s also an update of not only the Verhoeven RoboCop, complete with ED-209, but Blomkamp’s own District 9 as well in its themes of class inequality, sentience, and transformation. In its favour is how legendarily irritating the Chappie character is, to the point that when the slo-mo “hero strut” happens in the second half, the compulsion to punch the movie in its neck is nigh irresistible. To its detriment, Chappie purports to have solved the puzzle of digitized sentience, Transcendence-style, and in the process gifted immortality to Björk-lite squeaker Yolandi Visser. That’s at least Fourth Circle of Hell stuff right there.