2006
If a movie's success was determined by good intentions alone, "Bobby" would've been a box-office blockbuster. Writer-director Emilio Estevez fictionalizes more than a dozen story threads at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968 "? the day Robert Kennedy fell to an assassin's bullet "? but that tragic death is chiefly used as a canvas for Estevez to lament the lost idealism, activism and exuberance of the Sixties.
So much for peace and love. "Bobby" is tripped up by ham-handed melodrama, cardboard characters, clumsy sentimentality and the assumption that a sense of time and place can be achieved through the use of old pop songs and dated fashions.
Estevez certainly doesn't lack for resources, having assembled a star-studded cast that includes Sharon Stone, William H. Macy, Lindsay Lohan, Anthony Hopkins and Christian Slater. It helps, too, that the film's final moments have an undeniable poignancy. Still, it all arrives too late to rehabilitate a work so long on ambition and short on know-how.
"?Phil Bacharach
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