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It’s amazing how the death of someone prominent in the public eye can not only mythologize the person killed, but also the entire “scene” the person was in. Case and point: Robert Kennedy.

I was not alive when Robert Kennedy was making his bid for the presidency. And I’m not trying to argue that Robert Kennedy was somehow a bad person who is respected only because he was murdered. That’s not the point. The point is that, because of the mythology surrounding his campaign and his death, the pure mention of “Bobby” Kennedy is meant to tug at the heart-strings and give us a reason to pay attention to what is being said. Unfortunately, except for a few minutes of newsreel footage featuring Kennedy talking about some of the problems that he would try and fight if he became president, most of this movie seems bland, insipid, and pointless.

Other than the newsreels and the eventual climax with Kennedy’s assassination, what does this movie have to do with Bobby Kennedy? Very little, actually. Bobby definitely shows us where the phrase “too many cooks spoil the broth” came from, except here it’s “too many ‘big name’ actors spoil the movie.” In fact, by the end of the movie, I probably knew one or two of the characters' actual names. I tended to just refer to them as “Elijah Wood” or “Anthony Hopkins,” ‘cause the character names are generally mentioned once or twice throughout the entire movie, and there are really too many characters to keep track of.

The larger problem, however, is the fact that the movie has very little to actually do with Robert Kennedy. Instead, the movie spends most of the time having one of its characters (most of which are fictional, by the way) give some insipid “movie script” speech about racism or injustice or how the war is killing our innocent kids. I applaud the sentiment behind these speeches, but I don’t tend to go to movies to see people read platitudes that seem so rehearsed, so carefully constructed, that its tough to believe that these characters would actually say these words. Lindsay Lohan’s character doesn’t seem like the kind that would just give a heartwrenching speech about Vietnam randomly to the beautician giving her a manicure. The entire scene seemed fake, and unfortunately most of the interactions/speeches by the characters throughout the movie also seem fake.

Bobby ultimately fails on two accounts: First, the character development is so haphazard and scripted that the movie fails as a worthwhile character drama. Second, by promoting itself as a movie about Robert Kennedy’s assassination, it gives off the impression that the movie is going to take an “in-depth” look at the final days of the Kennedy campaign, something the movie only touches upon. In the end, Bobby ended up a boring melodrama with political undertones tacked on to try and give people a personal emotional reference point.

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Copyright 2008 Benjamin Wood