An excellent combination of Hans Zimmers’ electronically-booming score, sound effects and brilliantly rendered CGI is not enough to save the film “Chappie” from its unlikeable, one-dimensional characters.

 The film “Chappie” opened on March 6 and follows the story Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), a scientist who creates robots for the police force in a dystopian future, while aspiring to create a self-aware robot.

However, he gets turned down by his CEO (Sigourney Weaver), but decides to build it on his own.

Before he can do this, a couple of criminals, Ninja and Yolandi, capture him to force him to shutdown all of the police robots in order to score the ultimate heist as payback to their boss.

Deon is unable to oblige, but decides to build his self-aware robot, Chappie, to help himself and them.  Chappie needs to be taught things, much in the same light as a human child would, so Deon, along with Yolandi and Ninja, teach Chappie what it means to be alive.

Throughout this film, Hans Zimmers’ simply amazing score plays into all of the action.

The sound mixing of this film is also well done; mixing Hans Zimmers’ score with the whiz-bang sound of guns and other sound effects that go off throughout the film.

Chappie himself is also brilliantly rendered in how the special effects team integrated “painting” through CGI (computer generated imagery) over Sharlto Copley’s Chappie in post-production.

Despite being so well-rendered, Chappie is the embodiment of all that went wrong with this film.

For a character that’s supposed to be complex, Chappie is very shallow, both in personality and character development. As a result, he is extremely unlikable and underwhelming to watch for two hours.

Fact of the matter is there are no likable characters in this film. A majority of the characters are somehow involved with crime, but have no clear motives as to why, making them unsympathetic and one-dimensional.

To make matters worse, the interesting premise of Chappie is poorly executed and sadly misguided.

“Chappie” is a film that also plays with many big ideas, such as, what it means to be human living in a world of robots and man.

However, the film falls flat in its endeavor to tackle this existential conundrum.

It’s also worth mentioning, without giving anything away, that there is a great deal of plot holes in this film.

While “Chappie” is well-filmed and benefits greatly from Hans Zimmers all-electronic-based score and stunning visual effects from Chris Harvey and his team, it just wasn’t enough to hide how underdeveloped the film was.

This film is very entertaining for the first 20 minutes or so and last 10 minutes. Unfortunately for the audience, all that lies between is an underdeveloped story that had the potential to be as great as “District 9.”