AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

siwyaf Reviewers say this could have been "so much better" but they don't say how. Probably with an entrance of the Doors at the end playing "Soul Kitchen". It's like the movie The Seventh Seal. It's a great movie because of the subject and the way it is presented. I read as much as I could about Chapman including Let Me Drag You Down but this movie ,in a way, is more informative about why he was killed. It won't give you all the answers but it will show you what goes on inside the mind of a killer who wants to be a celebrity. I enjoyed the part where the photographer and the doorman Jose have a conversation with Chapman just before he stays for the final shooting. Jared Leto does a tremendous job of acting. When Mark Chapman reads the Playboy interview with Lennon you can feel that this is the point where he decides to go all the way. I read that interview at the time it came out and thought what an asshole, but so what? I knew the Beatles couldn't be what they were because they would have stayed together if that was all it took. I liked Lennon and thought he was the cool one when he was with the Beatles but that kind of success when your young is not easy to shake off when your older. I wish he was still around though because he was so outspoken it would have been interesting to see what he would have been saying today. Of course he didn't want be a radical anymore so he wouldn't have turned into the Dude.

museumofdave Many viewers seem to want to blame the director of this film for shooting John Lennon all over again, or emphasize that former sigh-guy Leto put on 80 pounds to inhabit the slovenly, corpulent body of Mark David Chapman and to no avail Those of us who lived through the Beatles, who admired them, were horrified by what seemed to be an inexplicable killing--and wanted explanations, as we want to understand the killing of a beloved celebrity or a president.As depicted in this film, the twisted psyche of this killer is not revealed--as as Friday says in Dragnet, we just get the facts, which are vivid enough to give us some idea of the weird hallucinations that went on in the mind of a killer obsessed with one of the most influential men on the planet. Since you know how this story is bound to end, you only might want to watch it if you want to see an acting tour-de-force or get some notion of what kind of sickness infested the man who called himself Holden. This film is not a cheerer-upper, and doesn't offer the usual voyeuristic excitements, but it seems sincere and well-assembled and Leto deserves credit for not wanting always to be The Dreamboat Guy.

sol ***SPOILERS*** We get the whole story of the murder of the Beatles John Lennon played by Mark Lindsey Chapman, no relations Mark David Chapman, straight for the horses mouth the person convict of murdering him Mark David Chapman, Jared Leto,in his cell at the Attaca Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Chapman a fanatical Beatle fan was so obsessed with his hero John that he traveled all the way from his home in Hawaii to New York City, some 6,000 miles, just to meet him. Camped out in front of the Dakota Hotel on the upper West Side of Manhattan Chapman got to meet a number of like wise fanatical Beatles fans like himself including free lance photographer Paul Goresh, Judah Friedlander. It was Paul, the photographer not the member of the Beatles singing group, who was to take the famous photo of John signing Chapman's Beatles album, with a smiling Chapman in it, just hours before Chapman ended up blasting him.Why! Why! did Chapman do it! Even now Chapman can't quite explain his actions on that fateful night in Decembner 1980. It just seemed that he was so obsessed with John Lennon and when he finally got to meet him something clicked in his sick and disturbed mind that turned him into a homicidal lunatic. John for his part was very nice to Chapman asking him if he wanted him to write anything personal on the album cover that he signed for him which an almost speechless Chapman declined to have him do. That in itself showed how crazy as well as unstable Chapman was and, now 30 years after the crime, still is.Jared Leto's portrayal of Mark David Chapman was right on target. He even gained some 67 pounds, going from his normal 160 to over 220 pounds,to look like him. Chapman was also obsessed with the underground 1960's J.D Salinger novel "Catcher in the Rye" that together with the Holy Bible Chapman was alway carried and was seen thumbing through throughout the movie. In fact it was "Catcher in the Rye" that Chapman was reading when the police nabbed him in front of the Dakota Hotel after he gunned down his hero John Lennon! We'll never really known, I don't think that even the very obviously psychotic Chapman knows, what motivated Chapman to commit the horrendous crime that he did. The guy wasn't that mentally stable to begin with in the first place. And when he finally met the person whom he was obsessed in meeting all these years something snapped in the poor guy's head that turned him into the monster that he became!P.S Check out the now very troubled Lindsey Lohan as Jude one of the John Lennon and Beatles fans outside the Dakota Hotel. Lohan is now in the process, besides getting bailed out of prison, of making a film about the late Hollywood glamor queen Elizabeth Taylor. In a number of the head on shots of Lohan in the movie she, at age 19 and 20, looked far more glamorous as well as cute and drop dead gorgeous then Elizabeth Taylor ever did at the very height of her motion picture career!

MisterWhiplash 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.