If ‘Chappie’ wants to live, audiences must accept a mish-mash of clashing tones

Some picky eaters can’t stand it when their foods touch – like when the pancake syrup flows into the sausage and eggs at breakfast, or when the vegetables spill onto the potatoes and the gravy slops onto their steak at dinner. Others are more than fine with the somewhat random mix of foods on the plate.

I’m definitely in the latter camp, which may explain why I liked the new sci-fi film “Chappie” more than others. It’s nothing if not a mish-mash of clashing tones and styles.

The short-hand take on “Chappie” is that it plays like a mash-up of “Robocop,” “E.T.” and “Blade Runner.” It’s not as fresh as “Robocop,” nor as sweet as “E.T.” It’s nowhere near as atmospheric as “Blade Runner.” But Chappie is still fun to watch, as long as you don’t mind eggs and syrup.

Like “Robocop,” “Chappie” posits a world (in 2016) in which more and more of the police force is made up of incredibly efficient robots. Crime plummets as soon as these police robots start assisting their human counterparts.

The company that makes these cop machines are rushing more and more into production. No one seems concerned about the inherent dangers of the self-contained models of artificial intelligence, except a jealous engineer who’s been working on a very different kind of crime-fighting robot.

His robot is one that’s run not by by A.I. but by a human who remains in control – remotely – at all times. Meanwhile, the rival engineer behind the successful robot cops is getting close to “perfecting” his model.

The movie, at this point, sets up a challenging/complex social question – are we better off if robots can think and feel for themselves or if they remain under our control at all times?

The film never answers or even attempts to confront this issue, because it has too much other business to get to, like of action sequences of heavily-armed bad guys shooting it out with cops and robots, and/or sentimental glimpses into what it’s like to raise an innocent child in a violent world.

Say what? Here’s where the E.T. portion of the film kicks in.

Our hero/engineer does indeed create the first fully conscious (thinking and feeling) robot out of scrap and damaged parts. But just like a human, this newly minted robot, Chappie, needs to learn from scratch. A good chunk of this two-hour movie consists of a trio of criminals “raising” Chappie – teaching him how to talk, read, think, reason, act ethically, and shoot a gun.

These sections of the movie, with the innocent robot awkwardly learning the ways of the world, are so disarming and downright charming, that “Chappie” takes on the feel of a children’s story.

The gangsta criminals start looking more like the buffoon criminals in Home Alone than the sadistic gangbangers they appear to be elsewhere in the film. The movie gets soft and sentimental and looks like it’s becoming a fable of some sort.

But then, there’s another notion/development/ philosophical theme that kicks in. Moving into Blade Runner territory, Chappie the robot comes face to face with his own mortality. He rages at his creator for his limited lifespan, his built-in demise.

“I want to live,” he desperately declares and his impulse to survive at any cost drives him further than anyone expects.

The movie devolves into a disappointingly massive and explosive CGI extravaganza near the end, but by that time the film has given us enough interesting, disparate parts that I don’t care so much that it doesn’t add up to a whole. Like the damaged mix-and-match scrap metal that makes up Chappie himself, this movie may not all work, but enough of it does to get where it needs to go.