Movie Review: Bobby
Written and directed by Emilio Estevez, “Bobby” stars what seems to be every A-minus and B-plus listed actor and actress in Hollywood. There are even a few plain old B-listers thrown in there as well. And a bunch who seem like their best days have passed them by. We get Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Elijah Wood, Lindsay Lohan, Martin Sheen, Helen Hunt, Shia LeBeouf, Heather Graham, Joshua Jackson, Nick Cannon, Laurence Fishburne, Christian Slater, William H. Macy and probably a few more that I have forgotten.
The movie focuses on a handful of stories taking place at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the ill-fated day in 1968 when Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. The stories involve either the hotel staff, ex-staff, Kennedy campaign supporters, hotel guests and a spaced-out drug dealer. Amongst the stories are two old coots playing chess and reflecting on the gold old days, a young couple getting married to avoid going to Vietnam, a racist catering manager, a bus boy with tickets to a Dodgers game, a taboo hotel affair, a strange trip on LSD, an alcoholic lounge singer and her husband, and a businessman and his young wife. It all culminates with Kennedy being gunned down and the movie ends with what might be the longest speech in the history of politics.
Bobby is a movie that has a whole lot going on and not a lot to care about. I mean, you’ve got all these stories being thrown at you and it’s really hard to feel for any or the stories or any of the characters. The only one I felt anything for was the Mexican bus boy who couldn’t go to the Dodgers game because his boss was a jerk-off. That’s pretty much it for me. As far as I’m concerned, any other character in the entire movie (except maybe Hopkins and Belafonte) probably deserved that bullet instead of Kennedy. To tell you the truth, most of the actors and actresses actually did decent jobs with their respective roles. It was just hard to care about any of them. It’s not like a movie like “Crash” where, despite all the stories and all the characters, you get some sort of feeling from everything going on, whether that feeling was anger, sadness, sympathy, understanding or whatever. “Bobby” doesn’t have that. It’s a bunch of stories thrown together that have no significance and no emotion. Even the speech at the end of the movie, despite giving us Kennedy’s unique and revolutionary views on war, peace, violence and race relations, was just way too long.
Kennedy, from everything I know, was a great man and potentially a great politician, but I’m not sure this movie does him much justice. It’s not the inspiring or emotional movie that I hoped a movie called “Bobby” would be. And for that, I feel nothing but disappointment. (5 out of 10)
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