Right away I sensed that Neil Blomkamp‘s Chappie (Columbia, 3.6) was a likely no-go. I could smell the old “ghost in the machine” notion of a robot having a semblance of a human heart and perhaps even a soul, and decided I wanted nothing to do with it. So I had my own reasons for really not looking forward to seeing today at 5 pm, but now reviews from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy and Variety‘s Justin Chang have filled me with even more trepdiation. Chappie “represents a further downward step for Blomkamp in the wake of the highly uneven Elysium,” McCarthy has written. Chang has similarly warned that “intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is one of the major casualties of Chappie, a robot-themed action movie that winds up feeling as clunky and confused as the childlike droid with which it shares its name.” It suffers from “a chaotically plotted story and a central character so frankly unappealing he almost makes Jar-Jar Binks seem like tolerable company by comparison“…hah!