10 Terrible Movies That Wasted A Truly Brilliant Concept

5. Chappie

Chappie 2015
Columbia Pictures

The Concept: Chappie stars Dev Patel as Deon, a skilled engineer who creates an artificial intelligence that can mimic human qualities like feelings and emotions.

Deon installs this intelligence in a recently-damaged police robot (which were created in response to high crime rates), but loses his new creation - dubbed "Chappie" - to a group of gangsters.

We've seen plenty of artificial intelligence movies over the years, but an artificial intelligence movie about a crime-fighting robot who's raised by gangsters? Now that's a cracking premise.

Why The Movie Failed: Every Neill Blomkamp movie is conceptually sound. District 9's aliens-oppressed-by-humans plot angle and Elysium's exploration of the class system are great ideas that were confidently executed - though Elysium pales in comparison to the director's first effort.

But Chappie was such an unbelievable misfire that it's hard to believe the same guy was behind the camera.

Problems began with the casting of rap group Die Antwoord in two leading roles, meaning the quality of acting is regularly shaky. Chappie also asks a lot of big, interesting questions, but never sufficiently answers any of them, with Blomkamp seemingly content to focus on the juvenile humour derived from his (at times) Jar-Jar Binks-esque titular robot.

Blomkamp wanted to make a level-headed movie but there's so much silliness in Chappie that it's hard to take seriously.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!