STARTING the clock on the assassination of John Lennon when Mark David Chapman arrives in New York from Hawaii makes “Chapter 27” a movie about a guy standing in front of a building.
Jared Leto is both hammy and porky as Mark David Chapman, the killer who convinced himself that he was adding another chapter to the 26 in “The Catcher in the Rye” during his mission to cleanse the world of the man he saw as a great phony.
In January, the flawed but far more chilling “The Killing of John Lennon” delved into Chapman’s background to trace the twists of logic that brought him to Lennon’s doorstep at the Dakota on Dec. 8, 1980. Here, Chapman is nuts from the beginning, muttering about Holden Caulfield and picturing fields of gently waving rye: “I’m going to be with you, Holden, in the rye, in the rye!”
While he waits for Lennon to show up, he meets a fellow fan (Lindsay Lohan, who gives a performance that is naturalistic bordering on nonexistent) and a photographer (Judah Friedlander of “30 Rock”).
This boring, torpid movie notices its own flaws and unwisely underlines them. Writer-director J.P. Schaefer has Leto deliver both a huffy, lurching performance and a speech about detesting phony actors who grab their foreheads while breathing heavily.
Leto, who gained poundage for the role, keeps taking his shirt off just to make it clear that he is the latest in a long line of actors to confuse daily patronage of the local doughnut shop with intensive actorly preparation.
When the characters talk about “Rosemary’s Baby” being filmed in the Dakota, the Lohan character explains why she didn’t like the movie: “It’s very slow-moving. Nothing happens until the end.” Yep, that kind of thing could really ruin a movie.