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Killing of John Lennon, The
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 10 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 4 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by: Andrew Piddington
Directed by: Andrew Piddington
Release Date:
Theatrical: January 2, 2008
Running Time: minutes, Color
Origin: UK
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Jonas Ball, Thomas A. McMahon, Robert C. Kirk, and Krisha Fairchild
The Killing of John Lennon is a chilling insight into the mind of Mark David Chapman, the 25-year-old narcissist who gunned down John Lennon outside his Dakota apartment in New York in 1980. Meticulously researched and filmed on actual locations where events occurred, the film is a gritty, imagistic examination of a celebrity stalker's mind leading up to the kill, as well as his descent into madness and exorcism. Independently financed and filmed over three years in Hawaii, Georgia, and New York, the film is unflinching in its presentation of the truth. It does not set out to condone or exonerate the shooting death of Lennon or his killer's desire for fame. Its theme of bomb-ticking loneliness and, by extension, the notion that America is a nation of angry strangers who vent paranoid resentment toward public figures couldn't be more resonant today. (Picture Players Ltd.)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Piddington does a beautiful balancing act, creating a movie that works both on the level of suspense and as a detailed factual chronicle.
Read Full Review >Variety Eddie Cockrell
Anchored by a fearless, commanding lead perf by newcomer Jonas Ball as deranged assassin Mark David Chapman, The Killing of John Lennon is a harrowing, impressionistic, widescreen tour-de-force that unfolds with the propulsive urgency of a scrapbook thrown into a howling wind.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
It's a "Taxi Driver"-inspired odyssey into violence and insanity that runs close to two hours -- a long time to be riding shotgun with a madman.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan
The film never gets beyond Chapman's obsession with "Catcher in the Rye" and a few bits of "Taxi Driver" dialogue to show us anything we didn't already know.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Sam Adams
"Killing" never moves past a superficial understanding of its subject, whose transcribed ramblings may not be the best key to unlocking his fractured mind. The movie gets inside Chapman's head but never under his skin.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck
Boasts an undeniable technical proficiency and historical authenticity, but this docudrama detailing assassin Mark David Chapman's obsession, stalking and eventual murder of the beloved Beatle nonetheless has an unavoidably exploitative feel.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
Shot in a quasi-documentary style at the actual locations where the events took place, including the sidewalk outside the Dakota, the movie is extremely uncomfortable to watch.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Matthew Sorrento
As the narrative lugubriously sticks to the documented events, we are served nothing more than a filmed transcript.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
An occasionally revealing glimpse inside the mind of Chapman before, during and after the assassination.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Aaron Hillis
Director Andrew Piddington's fastidiously researched, dubiously suspenseful character portrait is unable to salvage a lick of hindsight from the tragedy beyond "Murderous narcissists are people, too." (He's a victim of our celebrity-fixated culture? Oh, shut up.)
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 4 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Chad S. gave it a7:
"Killing" sounds less grandiose than "assasination", less like an achievement for the fame-seeking murderer, less paegantry. We want to remember the victim, not the man who pulled the trigger. "Killing" makes Mark David Chapman's cockamamy enterprise to kill an ex-Beatle appear senseless and pathetic. "Assasination" transmits the connotation of rational cognition and historical magnitude. Chapman did alter history. But don't tell him that. Don't encourage him. A film such as "The Killing of John Lennon" allows Chapman to confirm in his mind that he was somebody, and still is. An overreliance on the moods and textures of Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" is employed as filmic shorthand to explicate the killer's disconnect with the human condition. What at first may seem like an overt self-consciosness of the Scorsese film, starts to seem more like a savvy move when "The Killing of John Lennon" reminds us that soon after Lennon's death, John Hinckley nearly turned Ronald Reagan's two-term presidency into a much more abbreviated one. As Chapman alchemized J.D. Salinger's prose(from the unfairly maligned "The Catcher in the Rye"), Reagan's shooter did the same with Scorsese's mis-en-scene(Hinckley was fixated on Jodie Foster). Both men mistook a passive medium for an inter-active one. To associate Chapman with Hinckley; this is the intent of the movie. But an alternate reading, beyond the artist's control(sound familiar?), emanates from Ronald Reagan's presence as a presidential hopeful, parceled throughout the film in the form of campaign posters and speeches from the various media outlets. Reagan, let's not forget, was an actor, and in Chapman's mind, so was Lennon. If the viewer lumps together the Liverpudlian lad with the star of "Knute Rockne: All-American", instead of the Jodie Foster-enthusiast, Lennon's attributes, which Chapman assigns to him, are reconfirmed, because slanderous labels such as "fat pig" and "phony" sounds conspicously like the names that Reagan would receive from his harshest critics. If you link the late ex-governor of California with the composer of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Imagine", Lennon does become the "fat pig" and "phony" that Chapman believed him to be, through intertextuality and by proxy. A renegade consciousness, contrary to what the filmmaker intended, that Chapman's weird burlesque of Holden Caulfield was an act of righteousness, transforms the anti-hero into a hero.
Jay H. gave it a5:
Meticulously accurate and overly detailed account of the murder of John Lennon, but director Andrew Paddington developed a slow moving film with way too many lingering shots that should have been edited out. It's painfully slow at times and only scratches the surface of the killer.
