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The Killing of John Lennon (2006)

Director: Andrew Piddington

Time Out rating

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4 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

This writer has a number of issues with Andrew Piddington’s mostly stylish and allegedly accurate reconstruction of the days leading up to Mark Chapman’s murder of John Lennon. It’s a little too long, for a start, and occasionally bogged down by a surfeit of psychedelic dream sequences and repeated scenes. The title, too, is sensationalist, while the date of release – timed to coincide with the 27th anniversary of the Beatle’s death on December 8, 1980 – smacks of cynicism. Despite a conscience that was telling me ‘no’, I felt compelled to see this film as an avid Beatles and Lennon fan, if only to understand the machinations within Chapman’s dysfunctional mind. After 114 minutes of uncomfortable voyeurism, I was none the wiser.

There’s very little historical context. Instead, it kicks off only a few weeks earlier in Hawaii where the narcissistic creep (played convincingly by Jonas Ball) first stumbles upon JD Salinger’s novel, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, and finds himself at one with the book’s angst-ridden, teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Later, Chapman discovers a book on Lennon and comes to the decision that the singer was, using the phraseology of Caulfield, a hypocritical phoney. Taking Lennon’s lyrics (presumably those in the songs ‘Imagine’ and ‘God’) a little too literally, he buys a gun, leaves his meek wife and detached mother, and flies to New York where he performs a dry run before hitting the world headlines. After many unanswered questions put by prison psychologists, we’re left with at least one feasible deduction: Chapman was on a simple, skewed quest for infamy. And he got it. One gathers he’d be chuffed to see this film. And that’s the biggest issue of all.

Author: Derek Adams

Time Out London Issue 1946: December 5-11 2007

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User reviews of this film

Sall said...

Posted on Jun 10 2008 09:29 It lost my interest long before the end. Having no new insight that we have not already read about. I agree with the above comment "faffing about".

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Matthew McKinnon said...

Posted on Dec 05 2007 21:37 Wouldn't you know it... I slag off someone's spelling, and put a typo in myself. "Too." Great. Sorry.

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Matthew McKinnon said...

Posted on Dec 04 2007 13:23 I had no problem with Derek Adam's review. It's impossible to look at this film independent of its subject matter and our reactions to it.
As such, I think Adam did the right thing putting his cards on the table: this film exists because people have bonded [or not] to the Beatles, and the consequences of this attachment are a) part of the reason Lennon was murdered, b) part of the reason this film was made, and c) part and parcel of our reactions to / critical analysis of this film.
I don't think a review of the film can exist in a vacuum the way Jo Rouhani would like it too. Besides that, the review seemed pretty focused on what its faults were....
I'm puzzled by the response. And some of the spelling.

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jo rouhani said...

Posted on Dec 04 2007 12:21 Just a quick point about Derek Adam review. It is probabely one of the most appalling reviews I have ever read. "The Killing of JL" is definately not a good film but DA's critique of it is probabely worse than the film. DA's interest in answers to his whys and hows is nothing more than him expressing his childish fascination with a boy band pop group. As far as critising a film goes he should have focused on where the film, which is not in fact pretending to give you answers, has gone wrong, rather than saying it is not good because he is not telling exactly why he killed him... Sadly TO film reviews has become nothing more than some of the other pop jurno's like empire and total films and such likes... (except of course Dave Calhoun, which probably still makes it wothwhile to flick through TO film once in a while...)

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