DVD Reviews

Bobby

• Rating:
• Director: Emilio Estevez
• Starring: Anthony Hopkins
• Details: US / 120mins (15A).

I was really looking forward to this one: a multi-character plot surrounding the events leading up to Senator Robert Kennedy's assassination in the Ambassador Hotel, June 6th, 1968 promised to be one of the highlights of the year. It certainly boasts the biggest A-List cast in recent memory. However, Bobby falls down between too many stools as writer/director Emilio Estevez fails to juggle too many needless characters in too many pointless sub-plots. Ranging from Freddy Rodriguez's kitchen porter to Demi Moore's alcoholic lounge singer, Estevez shows us how important, and what a loss, Bobby Kennedy was to America. Before he even started, Estevez had a mountain facing him: not only did he have Hopkins, Graham, Macy and Moore to direct, he also had big names like Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood, Lindsay Lohan and, eh, Ashton Kutcher to deal with. 'Wow, what a cast' is the first thought that pops into anyone's mind, but the problem is that too many cooks spoil the broth. What happens is that you're not watching characters; you're watching celebrities and we're never allowed to forget that we're watching a movie, which, for a director, is death. Oliver Stone had the same problem facing him with JFK, but his characters felt like real people - not cardboard cutouts that are just there to stand around and be metaphorical in some way or another. It's easy to admire what Estevez was trying to do - raise the point that contemporary American politics needs someone like Bobby Kennedy, a man who could get diverse communities to unite and back him - but his execution leaves a lot to be desired. The sub-plots don't really go anywhere and by the end we feel cheated out of a story that had potential to be great.

Review by Gavin Burke