I haven't seen this film, but it strikes me that it would be enormously difficult to make a dramatically effective story out of any part of the life of Mark David Chapman. I know little about the man, but the bits I have read suggest that he was of an extraordinarily banal type: an isolated, self-absorbed obsessive with not much of a life. A human failure, in other words, whose sole claim to our attention is the fact that he murdered John Lennon to suit some internal logic perceivable only to himself. There is no inherent drama in this, and all you can do with it is simply exploit the pathos of Lennon's murder, or the fears of the audience, or use it as an excuse to moralize like a TV documentary journalist on the evening news about the lack of adequate "help'' for such people before they explode.
The opening of the synopsis at Rotten Tomatoes reads:
What went on in the mind of the man who felt compelled to assassinate John Lennon? Chapter 27 deftly pilots us into the dark psyche of Mark David Chapman the weekend before the December 8, 1980, shooting. Inspired by Chapman's recollections, and propelled by a haunting, tour-de-force...
This is all dreadful cliche: "dark psyche," "haunting, tour-de-force." I simply can't imagine anyone making something decent after having started with a premise like this. Exploitation, both of John and the film's audience, is all I'd expect.
