Bobby

Estevez doesn’t leap to mind when imagining a promising chronicler of America’s past, and on the evidence of ‘Bobby’, never was an instinct more true. It’s one of those films that sounds exciting on paper: 24 hours in the life of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, leading up to the death of Senator Robert Kennedy who was shot in the hotel’s kitchen on June 6 1968. It was a time of war, dissent, dashed ideals; go figure the easy parallels. Estevez cuts real footage of Kennedy into a drama that focuses on the supporting cast: the doorman, the hotel beautician, the Mexican cooks. His attempt to shoehorn what he sees as the grand themes of the period into a choppy, unsubtle and insubstantial script is embarrassing, and never more so than when he tries to recreate the experience of an LSD trip. A cameoing celeb cast (Ashton Kutcher, Lindsey Lohan, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Anthony Hopkins) negates the project further, pushing it into showbiz grandstanding territory and making it a film of disjointed sketches.