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The Killing of John Lennon
Metascore
49 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 10 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 10
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 10
  3. Negative: 2 out of 10
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  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. Variety
    Reviewed by: Eddie Cockrell
    70
    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.
  3. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    63
    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.
  4. 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.
  5. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Frank Scheck
    50
    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.
  6. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Sam Adams
    50
    "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.
  7. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    50
    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.
  8. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Matthew Sorrento
    40
    As the narrative lugubriously sticks to the documented events, we are served nothing more than a filmed transcript.
  9. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    38
    An occasionally revealing glimpse inside the mind of Chapman before, during and after the assassination.
  10. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Aaron Hillis
    30
    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.)
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User Reviews

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User Score
5.7 out of 10

Mixed or average reviews- based on 7 Ratings

User 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.… Full Review »
  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 **** 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.… Full Review »
  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.… Full Review »
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