It's December 1980. Mark David Chapman (Jared Leto) arrives from Hawaii to stay at the YMCA. He's obsessed with former Beatle John Lennon and starts staking out his New York home at The Dakota. He befriends Lennon fan Jude (Lindsay Lohan) and paparazzi Paul (Judah Friedlander). In a couple of days, he would shoot and kill Lennon outside of The Dakota.One can't deny Jared Leto gained a ton of weight and fully commits to this role. He gets full marks for the attempt. It's a tough watch. His slow droning narration is tiring and I'm not a big fan of narrations in general anyways. The story itself is a meandering walk in the mind of a mad man. Leto is fearless and it will win him an Oscar later on. It's too bad his performance is wrapped around something so flat.

Chapter 27 is a very tragic film, both in the subject matter of John Lennon's murder as well as its sheer amount of unreached potential. Firstly, I'll get this out of the way: Jared Leto's performance is absolutely sublime. He plays a Mark David Chapman who is awkward, sad, and kind of a loser, but simultaneously very chilling and dark. It is truly the performance of an actor who has completely immersed himself in the role, and brings it to a 6 from a 5 or even a 4 singlehandedly for me. In fact, all of the performances are at least decent. The direction is interesting, showcasing Chapman's deterioration as it goes on, and the use of hand-held camera in most shots gives a much more realistic, human feel to all of the increasingly disturbing goings-on throughout the film. There are a few very interesting recurring motifs that enlighten some of the stranger aspects of Chapman's personality, and begin to explain. It has all of this going for it, so the question remains: where does this movie fail? Well, I think it must be mentioned that the film was cut a full 16 minutes from its original Sundance version. Whatever the reasons for these cuts, whether the original version was poorly received and the missing minutes may have actually detracted from the rest of the film or simply a classic case of production studios not understanding an artistic vision, they severely hurt the overall product. I have read that the main point of the film is that Chapman is a metaphor for America as a whole, which has never managed to pull itself out of a state of adolescent confusion. This theory is supported by certain parts of the film, particularly at the beginning and the end, but I'm not sure that the director's vision is really focused enough to actually make that the case. Chapter 27 seems generally confused as to its intended purpose. Is it a character study of a severely damaged individual? No, the film distances itself from that interpretation almost immediately when Chapman narrates that his early childhood and abusive father is "not important". Is it a tragedy of a man who wants nothing more than to find an identity, and in doing so destroys his life? That is closer, and some evidence does bear that out to a point, but again I don't feel as if the tone of the film's conclusion really makes that the case. Perhaps this has been rather vague, but the truth is that Chapter 27, while certainly interesting, is a woefully pointless piece of cinema. Jared Leto's performance aside, this film is really nothing very special; it simply exists, rather uninterpretable. With all that it has going for it, it could have and most likely should have been much better.

"Chapter 27" tells the true story of Mark David Chapman, and the three days leading up to his assassination of John Lennon. He put four bullets into one of the most beloved and respected rock and roll icons in the world, changed history for the worst, and after the movie is done, we still don't quite understand why he did it.The most frustrating part of "Chapter 27" is that it is ambitious enough to take on a compelling true story, but somehow manages the drag the story's pacing by weighing it down with blatant egomania. It starts out on December 6, 1980, with Chapman (Jared Leto) taking a taxi into New York City. Throughout the movie, Chapman goes from hanging out in front of The Dakota, where John Lennon lived, to his hotel room and back again, stopping occasionally in insignificant places in between.The problem with this movie is not its historical accuracy. Did Chapman spend these three days meandering around before shooting Lennon? Yes, he probably did. What I want to know, however, is at least a little bit about Chapman's background. Chapman just hanging out in his hotel room is about as interesting as Ted Bundy eating a bowl of cereal. I want to know more about his obsession with the Beatles. Why did he choose to target Lennon as opposed to Paul McCartney, George Harrison, or even Ringo Starr for that matter? You can look it up, but you're never given a clear answer in this film.Plus, I really wanted to know a little bit about his life in Hawaii, where he lived before the shooting. He was married, so why did he cheat on his wife with a prostitute? Obviously there was something amiss in his marriage, but the movie only hints at the problem, not the cause.Perhaps most of all, Chapman obviously sees a lot of Holden Caulfield, J.D. Salinger's immortal character from "The Catcher In The Rye", in himself. After all, throughout the film, Leto quotes Caulfield verbatim, from asking a cab driver about how fish survive the winter, to dismissing movies as being "so fake". However, what is never explained, and what needed to be, is this: WHAT DOES HOLDEN CAULFIELD HAVE TO DO WITH KILLING SOMEONE?I happen to love "The Catcher In The Rye". In fact, I've read it twice, and I never came across any line in that book that suggested Caulfield wanted to shoot someone. Caulfield wasn't perfect, but he certainly was no killer. Obviously Chapman misinterpreted the book, but what this movie failed to explain was what part, or parts, of the novel Chapman fixated upon to get that message.All these things are frustrating because this movie should have been better. Jared Leto, after all, is a really good actor who has been in some great films ("Fight Club" (1999), "American Psycho" (2000), "Requium For a Dream" (2000)). In this movie, he went the route that Robert De Niro took in "Raging Bull" (1980) by intentionally putting on 60 pounds for this one role. He also adopts a creepy, whispering Southern accent heard throughout the film. Unfortunately, although Chapman was a true egomaniac in real life, Leto's attempt to portray him seems too vain. As a result, his performance comes off as self-aggrandizing as his stint in 30 Seconds To Mars.Lindsay Lohan, surprisingly enough, is really good in this movie as Jude, a Beatles fan who is more level headed than Chapman was. Jude was probably a fictional character, as I can't find any information as to whether a woman named Jude actually existed even on Wikipedia. Still, when the movie ended, I wanted to know what happened to her. I already know what became of Chapman.The film's final mistake at the end is fatal. It assumes that the climax, Chapman shooting Lennon, is its own reward. You see Leto point a gun, you hear a gunshot, and the screen goes black. You see some real life footage of fans mourning Lennon interspersed with newsreels from the time and an admittedly startling shot of Leto, as Chapman, looking directly into the camera talking about how he's the victim. What you don't see, however, is Chapman sitting down on the sidewalk reading "The Catcher In The Rye" before the police apprehend him. Chapman actually did this, and I find it more fascinating than anything. He didn't run away, and he could have. That fact alone speaks more about Chapman's egomania than Leto's gradually tired voice-over monologues ever could.Even worse is the on-screen epilogue, which states that Chapman is still in prison and is now a born-again Christian. Well, isn't that great! He was moronic enough to kill a rock and roll legend, and now he's repenting. Whoop dee doo! Such an uninspired epilogue is key to understanding what went wrong in this film: it never tells us anything we don't already know. Don't the filmmakers know that Chapman was a fool who played it cool by making the world a little colder?

Chapter 27 was conceived by its first-time writer/director as a way of showing the final two days of Mark David Chapman's existence before he plugged six bullets into John Lennon. Perhaps he thought going in to it that he would get a stirring and harrowing chronicle of this man's madness, but what he didn't figure on, apparently at any point in writing the script, was giving us a story or any kind of real sense of who Chapman was aside from a mumbling nut-case obsessed with Catcher in the Rye. According to reports, yes, he was attached to that Salinger book a lot, and yes he loomed around the hotel Lennon was staying at.But Scahefer misses any real chances to make the character compelling by sidestepping what is actually interesting about him- his past, only hinted at, with his wife and his time spent teaching Vietnamese children, being raised in a strict Christian upbringing apparently- for 84 minutes of the same muddled, pretentious beat over and over again. Since when was assassination this boring? And the blame on how bad this movie is can be spread out. Some of it is truly the Schaefer's fault just on the design of the narration. Sometimes narration can be really effective (I kept thinking back to the Informant, another movie about a mentally unbalanced individual with an inner-monologue as a prime example), but here it's nothing except dull diatribes and complaining and waxing and waning on how he feels or thinks that has nothing to say about Chapman himself or anything interesting about his situation. And some of the blame falls on Jared Leto. Packing on the pounds simply is not enough, not when the character is the same lump of a presence in the entire running time and we're left with absolutely nothing to feel for him except hate - not even so much for his impending crime but for his construction as a character- and while his voice isn't terribly annoying when acting in scenes, it's somehow unbearable in the narration. It's a colossal waste of listening space.Some of the other actors do try, but are also left slim pickings. Lindsay Lohan doesn't do too terrible, but that's considering what little of her character, another Lennon fan hanging out at the hotel, is revealed as. There's also a question, barely answered, as to why she wants to be around this loose cannon, who never once gives the impression of stability even in casual conversation (i.e. "I hate movies" dialog). Judah Freidlander fares a little better, but he too is only on screen so long as to just play a one note character the best way he can. And yet it says a lot that an actor like Leto, who can be talented and show range as in Requiem for a Dream or Panic Room, is reduced to being upstaged by his fellow performers who seemingly have less to do than him.The movie made me angry at how it unfolded, because there was no progression of anything. I kept thinking about how much of a better, or just more fascinating, story it could be showing how Chapman developed into this deranged and lonely persona, or even just giving us more to chew on about his life before his notorious act. It's telling a situation before a story, and one that, surprisingly, is dull and meandering and, often, laughably ill-conceived in every facet of production. I almost weeped at the end not because of a sense of loss for Lennon, or for the soul brought down forever due to his own madness as Chapman, but because I had to endure a filmmaker's lack of having anything to really say, and saying it poorly, pretentiously, and with a lack of respect for the audience.