STUDIO: Vitagraph Film
RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2008
STARRING: Jared Leto, Judah Friedlander, and Lindsay Lohan
WRITTEN BY: J.P. Schaefer
DIRECTED BY: J.P. Schaefer
GENRE: Drama
RATING: R

"I'm Mark. Mark Chapman. I'm here to meet John Lennon."

To play Mark David Chapman in Chapter 27, the murderer of John Lennon, Jared Leto gained 67 pounds. According to IMDB, he did so by downing cocktails of melted ice cream, soy sauce, and olive oil. That fact is more interesting than anything you'll find in the entirety of J.P. Schaefer's awful Chapter 27, a movie that only makes you sad that poor Mr. Leto clearly gave his all, including his health, to such a misguided, ego-driven project as this one. It takes a very deft hand to make spending 80 minutes in the mind of a madman worthwhile and Schaefer doesn't illuminate a single thing about Chapman, making the experience more of a torturous death march than something informative in any way about the final days of anonymity for one of the most notorious madmen of the twentieth century. It's the kind of biographical film that makes you run to other sources not so much to find out what the screenwriters left out but what they got wrong, knowing that every single scene feels less than genuine.

The title of Chapter 27, which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and has taken 15 months to get to theaters since then, refers to the 26-chapter Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, a book that influenced Mark David Chapman. By some accounts, Chapman considered himself to be living the life of Rye protagonist Holden Caulfield, making his infamous killing of John Lennon the unwritten 27th chapter of the book. Don't you love it when a project is pretentious before the lights have even gone down? Almost consistently narrated by a turned-up-to-11 on the creepy scale Jared Leto, Chapter 27 chronicles the final three days of John Lennon's life. What happened in those three days? Apparently, not much. Mark hung out in front of the Dakota, where Lennon lived, telling people (including Lindsay Lohan and Judah Friedlander) that he was looking for an autograph from his favorite singer. He grappled with internal demons telling him that John was a phony and that he had to kill him. He realized that his life was about to change, hired a prostitute at one point, and generally creeped out everyone around him until that fateful night when he actually met son Sean Lennon, got an autograph from John, and later shot and killed one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

To say that not much happens in Chapter 27 would be an understatement, which places the burden of audience interest solely on Leto's pudgy shoulders. It's not that the actor is bad (although he took some misguided classes in the school of creepy voices), but Chapter 27 should serve as a warning shot to other thespians that are considering massive transformations for their art - make sure you're doing it for the right project. Schaefer's writing and direction feels so misguided and full of its own self-importance that it becomes distracting from the paper-thin story at the center in nearly every single scene. Schaefer frames every movement of Chapman's in those final days, from reading an interview with Lennon at a restaurant to finding a copy of Catcher in the Rye at a book store, with overwhelming pomposity. At one point, the filmmaker actually draws a comparison between himself and Roman Polanski when a few characters talk about how nothing happens in Rosemary's Baby until the end and how most of the movie is slow. Schaefer makes the crucial mistake of thinking that a slow, overly serious pace and tone will automatically create tension. He should go watch Polanski again and realize that if you're going to make self-referential nods to Roman, Taxi Driver, and Psycho, you better have hit a home run or you'll make your strike out that much more painful.

It's this simple - Imagine hanging out in the head of a psychotic, indefensible loser for 80 minutes and getting nothing worth remembering or admiring in return. Finally, almost worse than the pacing and self-importance displayed by Schaefer as a writer/director is the complete lack of ANY attempt at period recreation. Never once will you think you're watching three real people from 1980 on the streets of New York. It always feels like LiLo, that funny guy from 30 Rock, and Jared Leto hopped up on Edy's and soy sauce. The Rosemary's Baby reference is the most blatantly written to be a comment on Chapter 27 itself but one of Chapman's lines feels much more appropriate - "I hate the movies. They're phony. SO Goddamn phony."