You sir, are no Robert Kennedy

The late 1960s rank among the most tumultuous periods in American history, right up there beside the Revolutionary period, the Civil War era, WWII and our current state. It's in these times that people look for a leader, and Robert Kennedy seemed, to many, like the man for the job in the summer of 1968. It wasn't to be, however, as he was gunned down in an L.A. hotel before he could receive the Democratic presidential nomination. Thirty-eight years later, director Emilio Estevez and a monster cast bring us "Bobby," a peek into the lives of a group of guests and employees at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of Kennedy's assassination. \nFor a movie that seems to pride itself on the sense of renewed hope and spiritual reinvigoration it can offer its time, "Bobby" feels awfully ham-handed. The interlocking stories of everyone from the owner/operator of the Ambassador to the cooks in the kitchen don't speak to much other than the fact that they were there when Kennedy was shot. When the assassination finally comes, the panic feels forced, as if the actors were content to stick with their characters' own stories and were unprepared to face the reality of re-creating history. \nEstevez makes an attempt to corral his cast and their individual stories, but the end result is more muddied than the political landscape of the time. The talents of Anthony Hopkins, William H. Macy, Martin Sheen and Laurence Fishburne are on full display, but Estevez's decision to toss actors like Demi Moore, Nick Cannon, Shia LeBeouf and Ashton Kutcher into the mix only works to confuse things. Christian Slater plays a manager who tosses around "Crash"-style heavy-handed racial commentary, and Elijah Wood and Lindsay Lohan are a pseudo-couple engaged in a poorly written draft-dodging scheme. "Bobby" hedges all its bets on its cast, and while most of the more seasoned actors shine, even they tend to get lost in the shuffle. \nMinimal supplements on this single-disc edition are limited to two mini-docs, one being an overview of the making of the film and one being a series of first-hand accounts from people who witnessed Robert Kennedy's assassination in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. The eyewitness accounts are mostly interesting, but the making-of featurette, presumptuously titled "Bobby: The Making of an American Epic," is only a cursory overview of production in which most of the cast and crew grossly overestimate the impact and importance of the film itself. \nUnder the direction of, say, the late Robert Altman, "Bobby" might've amounted to something. As it stands, it doesn't amount to much. While "Bobby" barely succeeds at shuffling all these actors into a coherent ensemble drama, it fails miserably at doing what Estevez claims it was meant to do, which is honor the spirit and courage of a man whose life was cut short as he tried to right the course of our nation.