Camden New Journal - Movies: The Killing of John Lennon

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with WILLIAM HALL
Published: 6 December 2007

Jonas Ball makes the fatal purchase as Chapman

How the wrong Beatle got shot

THE KILLING OF JOHN LENNON
Directed by Andrew Piddington
Certificate 12A

“I WAS never mad. I was blessed.”
With these chilling words Mark Chapman, who left his dirty thumb print on history by killing John Lennon, justifies his action when he pulled the trigger on the steps of the Dakota Building on December 10, 1980.
These are his actual words, repeated by actor Jonas Ball with a cold intensity, in director Andrew Piddington’s starkly uncompromising re-enactment of the eight months leading up to Chapman’s murderous vigil before he approached the ex-Beatle, asked him for his autograph, then produced his gun.
We follow the society misfit from his dead-end job as a security guard in Hawaii, becoming obsessed with Lennon and his way of life, and fantasising about killing him. Then he buys a one-way ticket to New York.
The film charts Chapman’s descent into an unreal world, and as a study of disturbed paranoia it is both fascinating and repellent.
The problem is that we know the outcome and there are no surprises. But it is certain to become one of the month’s talking points when it opens, and as a TV docu-drama it would be first-class.

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