the leading man is my tpye

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

'The Killing of John Lennon' is a pretentious, unoriginal and pompous movie that is not even worth to be compared to other movies based on the same theme, such as 'Taxi Driver' or 'The Assassination of Richard Nixon'.The worst part being probably the three or four uncredited quotations to Taxi Driver, it is pure and simple PLAGIARISM. If Chapman was actually inspired by Travis Bickle (the villain of Taxi Driver), then it would have been at least decent to show it in the movie. Besides, several scenes of this film are also largely inspired by Taxi Driver and Scorsese's camera-work in generalI gave 3 out of 10 because I reckon some technical skills (although it's largely overdone in my opinion, there is way too much editing in this movie).

In ways this felt closer to a dramatization then a film in the classic sense which I think was a great thing. It makes it feel as close to reality as a movie can be without being a documentary. Jonas Ball who plays Mark Chapman in this film is just amazing, I don't know exactly how close to reality he plays this character but honestly, so what, he is intense, interesting, unique and a force on screen. The film maker used transcripts from the trial and the diary of Chapman to create the dialogue in the film and that authenticates it enough for me, it opens a window into the mind of Chapman that most people would never know. I think the film did a great job, no an amazing job of making everything feel real, like cameras were catching this all as it unfolded. Even with the outcome already known to the audience the anticipation and intensity was at times at a very high level. I was glad the film did not stop earlier but instead went on past the killing into what I feel is the best moments of the film when you see the immediate transformation of Chapman and then slowly his return to insanity. This film proves that a single actors performance can truly make a film. My hats off to this director for recreating such a horrible event with what feels like such authenticity.

"I hate the movies. They're phony, so goddamn phony," says Mark David Chapman in Chapter 27. Other than The Wizard of Oz, Chapman isn't much of a film fan. The Mark David Chapman (Jonas Ball) in The Killing of John Lennon would probably disagree. Despite the opening credit in Andrew Piddington's film that "All of Chapman's Words are His Own," his Chapman liberally quotes Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now. Likewise, Piddington's direction liberally quotes Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Oliver Stone, and Spike Lee.The Killing of John Lennon skips backwards and forwards in time quite a bit in the first two acts. The narrative begins in September, 1980 with Mark David Chapman in Hawaii. The audience sees glimpses of him working as a security guard, freaking out about his overbearing, oversexed mother (Krisha Fairchild), berating his soft spoken wife (Mie Omori), hassling scientologists, and pretending to be a sniper. Chapman must be making good money with his crappy job. While he drives a shitbox car, he can afford a gun and two trips from Hawaii to New York.The aborted first "mission" to execute John Lennon doesn't add much to the story but appears to be included for the sake of accuracy. Unfortunately, this care about details isn't consistent. Two of the more obvious gaffes have a September 1980 news broadcast mentions that the presidential election is "next Tuesday" (a few months early) and a convicted Chapman is sent to Riker's Island instead of Attica.The pacing of Piddington's film is clunky. Once Lennon has been shot—far more graphically than in Chapter 27 which keeps the camera on Chapman throughout the killing—The Killing of John Lennon runs out of steam but remains on screen for another 40 minutes! This final act ambles aimlessly through police interviews, psychiatric interviews, and scenes of Chapman in prison where his narration grow tiresome.The Chapman of The Killing of John Lennon sees himself as an agent of change. He's ending the '60s with a .38 and helping to usher in a new era lead by Ronald Reagan. Election posters line the entrance of the library where Chapman rediscovers The Catcher in the Rye and a Reagan stump speech plays over the opening of the film. With a Chapman more indebted to Travis Bickle than Holden Caufield, the brief inclusion of John Hinkley Jr's assassination attempt of Reagan could have been interesting. Hinkley was another proponent of The Catcher in the Rye and swore allegiance to Jodie Foster after repeated viewings of Taxi Driver. With a dearth of material to keep viewers engaged, perhaps Piddington should have considered exploring the Hinkley parallels further.If you can imagine Fred Rogers ("Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood") impersonating Travis Bickle, you have a close approximation of Jonas Ball's performance as Mark David Chapman. Though his "accent" is mentioned, there's little trace of Chapman's Southern roots present in Ball's vocalization. The actor is also lacking the girth, Jim Jones glasses, and unassuming politeness of the killer. This Chapman looks more like Jim Morrison gone to seed. Leto's Chapman soars to heights and sinks to lows swiftly, often sounding like a petulant child. Ball is very even in his delivery, giving his Chapman much more of a sinister air.The Killing of John Lennon utilizes the multi-format approach popularized by Oliver Stone's JFK and Natural Born Killers. Piddington merely seems to be following Stone's example, adding nothing of his own. Things go from bad to worse in the third act which not only meanders in tone but appears to have been made as a student film and tacked on as an afterthought. The interview of Chapman by a Bellvue psychiatrist looks as if it were shot while the cameraman was asleep. Though, at nearly two hours (and half that filler), sleep is the most natural response to this sloppy film

This story traces the last three months of John Lennon's assassin Mark David Chapman, as he slips into the unreality of deciding he must kill John. I know there have been films like this before, about serial killers and assassins, but why one about Lennon? The film is authentic, using Chapman's own words, but the question is, why would you wish to go through the agony of this? If you were alive in 1980, and the Beatles in any way touched your life, you remember where you were when John was gunned down. I don't think the film's goal is to explain Chapman, just to give a sober account of him. In and of itself, I accept that. The acting also is pretty good in this film. But, its like revisiting a really horrible moment in your life on celluloid. If you loved John, you should have mixed emotions, at best, watching this. A pet peeve, almost inexcusable: When Chapman comes to New York and he is in the cab along Times Square, you don't see the Times Square of 1980, you see it as it is now. The Virgin Megastore did not exist in 1980! Times Square was a dangerous place in those days, full of prostitutes and x rated movie theaters. There is no reason why that scene happened. So, if you loved John, I'd skip it. The last thing a Beatle fan needs to hear about is Mark David Chapman.