Chapter 27

By the end of this modest, strange venture, Leto made me believe it was worth being forced to hang out on the sidewalk with this man, if only to get a creeping sense of what that might’ve been like.

It's a transformative role, but how widely seen it is depends on how strong a stomach one has for wall-to-wall paranoid ravings.

The film's 85 minutes drag by painfully slowly, because there's no respite from Chapman's tedious, self-pitying reveries.

There's virtually no context provided here, about Lennon or the Beatles or New York or Chapman himself. To put it another way, the film's entire context IS Chapman.

Don't hammer this film for trying to get inside the head of Mark David Chapman before he shot John Lennon outside the rock legend's New York apartment on December 8th, 1980. Hammer it instead for failing to do so with any depth or insight.

This boring, torpid movie notices its own flaws and unwisely underlines them.

Visually ugly, morally non-existent and a complete black hole in the departments of insight and wit, Chapter 27 is quite possibly the most godawful, irredeemable film to yet emerge in the 21st century.