It's a well-worn cliché that
notorious killers, especially of the serial variety, are described as nice,
quiet, and absolutely the last person anyone would expect to have a basement
decorated with human skulls. Well, if any of the other
characters were asked to describe Jared Leto's Mark David Chapman in the
leaden, slow-motion train-wreck that is Chapter 27, they'd probably say he was a clearly
unhinged loner, obviously on the verge of committing a horrible crime. There
are wild-eyed lunatics gnawing their way through straightjackets in asylums who
are less ostentatiously crazy than Leto is here. It'd be tempting to call the
film a bizarre vanity project for executive producer/part-time pop-star Leto,
but it's actually characterized by a surreal lack of vanity. Leto gained nearly
70 pounds to play a fat, bloated, repulsive loser, and he's equally repugnant
from a psychological standpoint.
In a performance of voluminous
quantity and negligible quality, Leto acts up a storm as a lost, disturbed
spiritual seeker who labors under the delusion that he's the living embodiment
of Holden Caulfield, the tragic anti-hero of Catcher In The Rye, and must kill John Lennon.
Throughout his tragic trip to New York City, Leto floats in and out of the
lives of peripheral characters like Lindsay Lohan's sweet-natured Beatles buff
and Judah Friedlander's understandably freaked-out paparazzo; he tries to make
a human connection, but proves his own worst enemy.
E-Nuhn-Cee-Ayting every overwritten
line as floridly and melodramatically as possible, Leto delivers a performance
that unwittingly suggests Truman Capote playing Travis Bickle in a poverty-row
remake of Taxi Driver. Writer-director
J.P. Schaefer tries to plunge audiences deep inside his protagonist's tortured
psyche through constant, comically over-the-top voiceover narration, but ends
up wallowing in overwrought pop-goth clichés. It's never an encouraging sign
when a film about the murder of John Lennon has audiences rooting for the
climactic shooting, just so a dreary, sordid, worthless film will come to a
merciful end. Perhaps the harshest criticism that can be directed at Chapter
27 is that it's
awful even for a late-period Lindsay Lohan movie. It might even be bad enough
to inspire Catcher
author J.D. Salinger to break his decades of public silence to speak out
against this high-camp fiasco.