Michael Sirow | Through the Shattered Lens

On December 8th, 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City by a man named Mark David Chapman.

While much has been written about John Lennon and his life and his beliefs, Mark David Chapman, serving a life sentence and rarely giving interviews, has always remained more of an enigma. What exactly motivated him to shoot John Lennon remains a mystery. At the time of the shooting, Chapman was carrying a copy of Catcher In The Rye and some accounts insist that Chapman believed himself to be Holden Caulfield or that he shot Lennon to try to bring more attention to the book. Depending on which source you go to, Chapman was either a Beatles superfan or he was someone who rarely listened to rock ‘n’ roll. Chapman either worshipped Lennon or he was offended by Lennon’s flippant remark about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus. Some people claim that Chapman was looking for fame by killing someone famous. Others claim that Lennon was not even Chapman’s main target and Chapman, in one of the few interviews that he did give, listed a long list of targets — including several other celebrities and politicians — that he considered going after at one point or another.

If anything, Mark David Chapman would appear to be a lot like Arthur Bremer, the directionless drifter who seriously wounded Governor George Wallace in 1972 and whose diary inspired Paul Schrader to create the character of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Chapman, Arthur Bremer traveled the country without apparent direction. Like Chapman, Bremer considered many different targets before settling on Wallace. And like Chapman, Bremer gave a lot of conflicting reasons for his actions. One gets the feeling that neither Chapman nor Bremer (nor a lot of other assassins) really understood why they were driven to kill (or, in Bremer’s case, attempt to kill) so they grasped at whatever solution seemed to convenient at the time. Apparently, anything was preferable to just admitting to being a severely damaged human being.

2007’s Chapter 27, follows Mark David Chapman (played by Jared Leto) as he travels to Manhattan and spends several days camped outside of the famous Dakota Apartment Building, hoping to see John Lennon (played by Mark Lindsay Chapman, who reportedly missed out on an earlier opportunity to play Lennon because he shared the same name as Lennon’s assassin). The film is narrated by Mark David Chapman, who tries to talk tough just like Holden Caulfield but who can’t hide the fact that he’s basically just a fat loser who has no idea how to communicate with any of the other people that he meets in New York. He creeps out a friendly groupie (played by Lindsay Lohan). He gets into an argument with a photographer (Judah Friedlander). He annoys countless Dakota doormen. About the only person who isn’t annoyed by Chapman is Lennon himself, who politely signs an autograph just a few hours before Chapman shoots him in the back.

It’s a well-made and well-directed film and Jared Leto gives a memorably creepy performance as Mark David Chapman. (That said, the accent that he uses while speaking as Chapman once again proves the danger of giving a method actor any role that involves a Southern accent.) Leto gained a good deal of weight to Chapman and he’s thoroughly believable as a very familiar type of obsessive fan. That said, the film still can’t make Chapman into a particularly compelling character because there’s really nothing compelling about someone like Mark David Chapman. The man he killed was compelling, regardless of what you may think about the politics of a song like Imagine. But Chapman himself was just a fat loser. Leto does a good job of portraying Chapman as being a fat loser but it’s still hard to watch the film without wondering what the point of it all is. We don’t need a movie to tell us that Mark David Chapman was a loser.

At its best, the film creates a sense of claustrophobia. Almost the entire film is told from Chapman’s point of view and the best moments are the ones where Chapman finds himself overwhelmed by 1980s New York. It’s a film that does inspire one to consider how strange it is that someone like Mark David Chapman could change the course of the culture through one deadly action. (The film did cause me to think about how different things would have been if Chapman had boarded a Greyhound and left New York without returning to the Dakota that night.) But, in the end, the film cannot answer the question of why Chapman did what he did. Perhaps that’s because there really is no answer, beyond the randomness of fate and the dangers of fame.

After his wife is killed in a car crash, former police chief Frank Richards (Bruce Willis) takes a job as a security guard for a small town convenience store. It’s not really a demanding job. As we see in one montage, Frank spends most of his time playing solitaire. However, one evening, Frank steps out back to have a cigar and he just happens to catch meth dealer Virgil Brown (Massi Furlan) executing a man. Frank promptly disarms and arrest Virgil.

Virgil’s son, Jake (Michael Sirow), is not happy about this. Knowing that Frank is the only eyewitness who can testify against Virgil at his trail, Jake heads off to kill Frank. However, when Jake arrives at Frank’s cabin, he discovers that it is inhabited by Frank’s daughter, Chloe (Ashley Greene), and her girlfriend, Tammy (Stacey Danger). Jake tries to take Chloe and Tammy hostage but Chloe turns out to be a lot tougher than he assumed. Chloe is waiting to hear whether or not she’s cancer-free and, as she explains to Jake, she has nothing to lose by risking her life and fighting him. And while Jake is certainly dangerous and quick to fire his gun, he’s also not the most competent criminal to ever come out of the backwoods of Alabama. If you’re guessing that this leads to several scenes of various characters chasing each other through the woods and shooting at each other, congratulations! You’re right!

This was one of the last films that Willis made before announcing his retirement last year. Watching the film, it’s easy to see that Willis was struggling a bit. There’s none of the swagger that viewers typically associate with Bruce Willis and he delivers many of his lines in a flat monotone. That said, this film is still a better showcase for Willis than American Siege or Fortress: Sniper’s Eye. Indeed, in the early scenes with his soon-to-be-deceased wife, Willis feels a bit like the Willis of old. Even if Bruce Willis was struggling to remember his lines, his eyes still revealed a lot of emotional depth. In the scenes where he and his wife discuss getting older and mention how scary it is to be sick, the dialogue carries an extra resonance. If nothing else, the role of a decent man who will do anything to protect his family seems like a more appropriate final role for Willis than the various crime bosses that he played in some of his other ’22 films.

Unfortunately, Wrong Place gets bogged down with the whole hostage subplot. There’s only so much time that you can spend watching people yell at each other before you lose interest. Ashley Greene, Stacey Danger, and Michael Sirow all give convincing performances but the film itself falls into a rut. When Jake is first introduced, he seems like he could be an interesting villain. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing but he’s determined to impress his father. (Sadly, it’s pretty obvious that Jake’s father will never be impressed with anything Jake does, regardless of what it may be.) Jake’s incompetence makes him even more dangerous because it also makes him impulsive and quick to anger. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do much with his character. Once the action kicks in, he just become another generic backwoods villain.

I get the feeling that the director meant for Wrong Place to be more than just another action film. The film moves at its own deliberate pace and, even after the hostage situation has concluded, the film still goes on for another ten minutes. One gets the feeling that the director wanted to make a sensitive film about the relationship between a headstrong daughter and her old-fashioned father. But, because this film was also a low-budget action film, he also had to toss in some backwoods meth dealers. The film has some moments of unexpected emotional honesty, many of them curtesy of Ashley Greene. But, in the end, it keeps getting bogged down with endless scenes of people running through the woods with guns. The end result is an uneven film but at least Willis gets to play a hero again.