Bobby: Critic Reviews

Bobby coasts along on a dread, and sorrow, it doesn't earn.

With Bobby, Emilo Estevez tries to link the intimate stories of nearly two dozen characters to a large and consequential public event the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Liberal Hollywood may well be looking for a uniting, inspiring figure of principle in these troubled times. Bobby Kennedy is a dull choice.

Despite its flaws, its intriguing premise leaves us haunted by thoughts of 'What if?'

Ambitious, uneven and deeply affecting drama.

Ham-handed and TV-movie flat, it states the obvious, then states it again and again and again.

Estevez means to eulogize the hopes of a nation, showing the night's impact on a group of hotel guests and staff cross-sectioned by age, race, and class. But his movie ends up buried under its stifling good intentions and dire execution.

For all its flaws, Bobby is a heartfelt and undeniably relevant project.

Emilio Estevez's Bobby tests your patience to the breaking point -- maybe beyond.

With so much brandishing of name actors in small roles, Bobby feels like a '70s disaster flick, with the disaster in the final minutes. While waiting, viewers must content themselves with playing spot-the-star.

Always engaging, rarely revelatory, Bobby earns credit for its convictions and its ability to dramatize those convictions in the context of a man who embodied them.

A compelling film of tender moral decency that boasts a number of moments not to be shrugged off.

Despite the clunkiness, Estevez's commitment to his father's generation's idealism (and its murder) commands respect.

Estevez has made a vague gesture at a large, metaphoric structure without having the dramatic means to achieve it.

A daring, messy and strangely rewarding patchwork that's straining at the seams.

So keenly felt and so deeply imagined I couldn't help but be moved, even grateful for its bleeding-heart nostalgia -- which winds up feeling rather up-to-date.

An earnest and altogether silly piece of conjectural melodrama.

There are important movies and engrossing movies, but it's not often that both terms apply to the same movie. Bobby, which opens Thursday, is a fictionalized account of the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and it's one of the exceptions.

The most interesting person in this maze of a movie is by far the title character. And his absence leaves an inescapable void.

What little plot Bobby has is overshadowed by the star spotting.

For all his good intentions, Mr. Estevez has reduced history to a bad melodrama in which nothing much happens until a crazed assassin (of whom we catch only a fleeting prior glimpse) supposedly destroys the last great hope of a liberal renaissance.

Every frame is informed and fueled by Mr. Estevez's impassioned mourning for a figure who came close to changing the course of American history. Bobby is exciting, involving and riveting.

A passionate outcry for peace and justice in America that becomes deeply involving by the final climactic scene, overlaid with one of RFK's most stirring speeches.

Bobby, which reportedly is going to receive a huge push for the Oscars, is one of the year's worst movies.

It's a tin-eared movie, in many regards, history rewritten by that C-student who tries to jam too many footnotes into every character.