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The Killing of John Lennon
The Killing of John Lennon Image
Metascore
49 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 10 Critics What's this?

User Score
5.7 out of 10

Mixed or average reviews- based on 7 Ratings

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  • Starring: Jonas Ball
  • Summary: 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.)… Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 10
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 10
  3. Negative: 2 out of 10
  1. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    75
    Piddington does a beautiful balancing act, creating a movie that works both on the level of suspense and as a detailed factual chronicle.
  2. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Marc Mohan
    58
    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.
  3. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    38
    An occasionally revealing glimpse inside the mind of Chapman before, during and after the assassination.

See all 10 Critic Reviews

User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 3
  3. Negative: 0 out of 3
  1. LDChappell
    8
    Very chilling account of the senseless John Lennon murder. It's missing a few factual elements that would have made it a bit more interesting. Mark David Chapman was tubby and had a piggy face. This actor was way too good looking to do him justice.… Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  2. ChadS.
    7
    "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.… Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  3. JayH.
    5
    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.… Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes