YMMV / Chappie

• Awesome Music: Even if you're not an Antwoord fan, the original score by Hans Zimmer is absolutely gorgeous. If you are an Antwoord fan, Cookie Thumper playing during the montage of Chappie learning to fight, and the score fading into Enter the Ninja at the end.
• Base-Breaking Character: Chappie himself to most critics. To some, he's an adorable child-like robot who doesn't deserve any of the abuse he receives in the film, while others consider him the robot equivalent of Jar-Jar Binks.
• Broken Base: The general reaction to Die Antwoord being cast in the film. People who are their fans or otherwise familiar with the characterization of Ninja and Yolandi reacted favourably whereas those already disliking them or unfamiliar to their characters did not. As seen in this wiki, there seems to be no middle ground.
• Catharsis Factor: Given what an awful person he proved to be throughout the entire film, Vincent Moore receiving a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at the hands of Chappie manages to be very satisfying.
• Complete Monster: Vincent Moore is a former soldier turned engineer and the designer of the Moose robot. Envious over Deon Wilson's police Scout robots overshadowing his funding for the Moose, Vincent conspires to sabotage Deon's reputation. After threatening Deon to give up a guard key controlling the Scouts' programming, Vincent tracks down rogue Scout Chappie before cutting off one of his arms and extracting his guard key. Afterwards, Vincent permanently shuts down all of the Scouts in Johannesburg, endangering all the civilians and police officers in the subsequent mass rioting solely so he'll be able to take the credit for rescuing them later. When Vincent's supervisor gives him permission to use the Moose, he tracks down and mercilessly mows down several criminals, not caring that both Chappie and Deon are nearly killed in the ensuing shootout.
• Critical Dissonance: Some critics were brutal on the film, yet the audience opinions have been much more forgiving.
• Designated Hero: Ninja and Yolandi. The film tries to pass them off as sympathetic, but most of the viewers found them too scummy and manipulative to be likeable.
• Friendly Fandoms: If you go on tumblr and look up the film, don't be surprised if you see fan art of Chappie hanging out with Baymax.
• Glurge: Nathan Rabin pretty much sums it up in this review.
  "Blomkamp’s disastrous film has no real sense of what it wants to be or what it wants to achieve. The unashamedly earnest, father-son relationship between Deon (a saintly sort who wants to selflessly aid human- and robot-kind alike) and Chappie (who serves as Frankenstein’s monster to Deon’s overwhelmed Doctor Frankenstein) speaks to a deep, almost embarrassingly[sic] sincerity at the film’s core. Chappie doesn’t just believe in things. It believes in deeply embarrassing things like childhood innocence, and friendship, and how war and crime are not healthy for children and other living things."
• Harsher in Hindsight: The first scenes of Chappie and Ninja become much harder to watch after Die Antwoord came under fire when Ninja and Yolandi's real-life adopted son, Gabriel "Tokkie" Du Preez, came forward with allegations of abuse and exploitation against them in 2022.
• Iron Woobie: Chappie himself, considering the sheer amount of things he goes through during the film.
• Jerkass Woobie: For most of the movie Ninja keeps abusing Chappie and using him for his schemes, and many of his choices contribute in making things worse. He was however motivated by the desire to protect his companions from Hippo, and at the end, he's lost both Amerika and Yolandi. If it wasn't for Chappie and Deon (who'd have more than one reason to stay away from him), he'd be completely alone now. He finds the flash drive with Yolandi's conscience for Chappie to upload, but it's clear things won't be the same anymore.
• Memetic Mutation: "That's Chappie."
• Narm:
  • Hearing the trailer announcer guy say "Chappie" in a ridiculously serious tone at the end of trailers.
  • Yo-Landi screaming "YOU'RE AN EVIL PERSON!!!" at Ninja after Chappie gets abused yet again. Ninja's weak "I didn't know this was going to happen..." adds to the hilarity.
    • Made all the more hilarious by Ninja's very prominent "EVIL BOY" tattoo.
  • Likewise, "YOU'RE A SHITTY PERSON!" from Deon after Ninja kicks him off the factory, though this may be intentional, as Deon IS a weird nerd.
  • Ninja's facial expressions. At one point we get a slo-mo closeup when he fires his assault rifle that looks like he's just stubbed his toe.
  • The ending. Yolandi dies earlier in the movie, but it turns out Chappie saved her consciousness as a backup. He proceeds to have a new, robotic body built for said consciousness. It's a drone like the ones Chappie and Deon inhabit, but with an not-quite-right feminine human face. Even worse, a particularly cheesy Die Antwoord song is playing over the sequence and leads into the credits.
• Moral Event Horizon: Vincent Moore has several such as torturing Chappie in an attempt to steal the Guard Key or using said Guard Key to turn off all of the robots to make his droid shine, but the real kicker comes in the climax when he gleefully kills Amerika and Yo-Landi with the MOOSE.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The first sign that Moore's a complete psychopath where he pins Deon to his desk and sticks a gun in his face in full view of their coworkers, then lets him go and laughs it off like a joke, revealing that the gun was empty. Later on, we see him actually firing his gun in the workplace, further traumatising his coworkers.
  • The death of Amerika. Just being crushed by the Moose's foot would be enough, but Moore takes delight in using the mech's pincer arm to tear him in half at the waist and throw his upper half against a wall.
  • Chappie's beat-down of Moore. It's both satisfying and horrific. Michelle's look of terror is a reminder that while the protagonists and the audience see Chappie's sweet side, the general public and the rest of the office sees a rogue robot perfectly capable and willing to beat down or kill someone without even needing a weapon.
  • Hippo is the scariest human in the movie, even more so than Moore, who at least tries to control himself. A sadistic, unhinged psychopath with a small army of disposable gangbangers at his command, he'll go from growled threats to "let's just kill everyone and call it even, eh?" without batting an eyelid. He doesn't seem to being enjoying himself unless he's threatening or brutalizing something.
• Questionable Casting: Pretty much everyone's reaction to Die Antwoord being in the movie. Ninja had initially been promised the main role in Elysium and gotten shot down by the studio (Eminem was also considered early on); putting Die Antwoord in Chappie was essentially Blomkamp apologizing to them.
  • Tellingly, the DVD case goes out of its way to avoid showing Die Antwoord, not including any photos or mentioning their characters in the plot summary. The only mention of them is in the general cast list on the back...which is written in a color that almost matches the background so one could easily miss it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Somewhere, buried in the concept of hardened criminals raising and being raised by a childlike robot is a good idea for a film. Unfortunately, between the Stunt Casting of Die Antwoord and the mostly-unlikable cast of characters, that idea is not well-served here. For that matter, many viewers felt that the plot would have been much better if Die Antwoord were cut out completely and the film focused more on Deon, Moore, and Chappie's growth.
• Uncertain Audience: As pointed out by Nathan Rabin in his review, the film seemingly can't make up its mind on whether it should be a violent, R-rated crime drama or a family film starring a quirky, child-like robot. The result is a film that's too violent for anyone under 17 and too stupid for anyone over 17.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: A major problem many had with this film is Die Antwoord's characters in it. The film tries to make them sympathetic criminals surviving on the streets, but most people simply found them to be scumbags who manipulated Chappie into a life of crime. The lackluster acting from them doesn't help either. Although it's debatable that the film portrays Ninja as sympathetic at all until the very end when he attempts to sacrifice himself; conversely, Yolandi is depicted throughout most of the film as a motherlike figure towards Chappie.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: A movie about a self-aware, peace-loving robot who just wants to live and be left alone and his scientist friend who's helping him evade the authorities who want to capture him...sounds like the typical family film plot, right? Actually, it's an R-rated action movie, and while it's not nearly as violent as Blomkamp's other films (there's exactly one explicit gore shot in the entire film), it's certainly not kid-friendly. Ninja's dialogue is pretty much one straight Cluster F-Bomb, for example.

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