Chappie
This wasn't really the movie I thought it was going to be. But I liked it.
Chappie the robot was endearing and funny.
The story borrowed so heavily from Robocop and Terminator, though, that it frayed from the center out.
The performances from Mommy and Daddy were shockingly bad as was a good bit of their entire "we have to do the heist to get $20 million" storyline. Daddy, aka Ninja, was a particularly poorly sketched out character bouncing wildly from emotion to emotion without any real balance. Did he care, did he not? Do we?
Hugh Jackman's Moose-bot was so completely similar to the failed ED-209 from the Robocop series that it might as well have been a carbon copy. It was exactly the same machine.
Buried within this uneven film, though, was a study of what makes us, well, "us." Who are we? Are we nothing more than the neural patterns that make up our consciousness? Can those be manipulated? Can they be transferred? Can they be re-created?
I enjoyed watching Chappie play at being a gangster, struggle with the human capacity for lies and betrayal and figure out what made him tick. I thought it was a good movie, but it bogged itself down in the dim-witted larceny of Mommy, Daddy and Amerika without giving the "Who Are We" theme enough time to properly breathe.
Side note: Where did they get those t-shirts?