MARK David Chapman’s chilling diary entries and transcripts of his conversations form the basis of “The Killing of John Lennon,” an occasionally revealing glimpse inside the mind of Chapman before, during and after the assassination.
Those who don’t know the details of Chapman’s thinking may be somewhat intrigued by his obsession with “The Catcher in the Rye” and his belief that Lennon was a phony who deserved to die – much as Holden Caulfield fantasized about killing a pimp – because he sang “Imagine no possessions” while owning a yacht and lots of other luxury property.
A creepy performance by an appropriately scummy Jonas Ball holds the film together. The pacing is slow, though, and the movie tests the limits of how much time you want to spend listening to a lunatic.
A Brit maker of TV movies, Andrew Piddington directs with comical ineptitude; Chapman hangs around a Times Square that Piddington makes no attempt to disguise as the 1980 version.
In a howler of a scene, Chapman, who is supposedly coming in from an airport, is in a cab heading downtown through Times Square (which is not, from any airport, on the way to the Waldorf-Astoria, where Chapman is heading). He passes 43rd Street, then is suddenly several blocks north of there so he can pass it in the same direction again, as dozens of signs and landmarks that weren’t there in 1980 can clearly be seen through the windows of the cab. The cabby says he will shortly pass Lennon’s place on West 72nd – the exact opposite direction.
Even if you can forgive Piddington’s mangling of the basics, you will find it hard to overlook his frantic use of slo-mo, a wobbly camera, freeze frames, double exposures and a close-up of a single eye. And since Piddington couldn’t secure the rights to any Lennon songs, he fills the soundtrack with a strangely random collection of work by anonymous soft-rock groups with no evident ties to anything in the movie.
THE KILLING
OF JOHN LENNON* 1/2Imagine a better movie.Running time: 114 minutes. Not rated (profanity, violence). At the IFC Center, Sixth Avenue and Third Street.