If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Blistering performances.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

-Bobby is a 2006 American drama film written and directed by Emilio Estevez, and starring an ensemble cast. The screenplay is a fictionalized account of the hours leading up to the June 5, 1968 shooting of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles following his win of the 1968 Democratic Party presidential primary in California.--Critical reception:-Bobby received mainly mixed reviews from critics, who praised its ensemble cast and the direction of Emilio Estevez but criticized the film for having too many plot points and characters. It has a rating of 46% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 169 reviews, with an average score of 5.6 out of 10. The consensus states, "Despite best intentions from director Emilio Estevez and his ensemble cast, they succumb to a script filled with pointless subplots and awkward moments working too hard to parallel contemporary times." The film also has a score of 54 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 31 critics, indicating mixed or average reviews. -A. O. Scott of The New York Times said, "Emilio Estevez . . . sets himself a large and honorable task. It is important to appreciate this in spite of his movie's evident shortcomings. Intentions do count for something, and Mr. Estevez's seem to me entirely admirable . . . The actors seem more like 'very special guest stars' than like real, 1968-vintage Americans, and their period-appropriate get-ups . . . are more distracting than convincing . . . Some of the stories feel too obviously melodramatic, while others are vague to the point of inscrutability. In the Vietnam- and drug-related plots, the point is hammered home too hard . . . while other narratives wind toward no discernible point at all. Nonetheless the ambition behind Bobby is large and serious." -Kevin Crust of the Los Angeles Times called it "an ambitious film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that, despite the energy provided by its title icon via archival footage, falls flat dramatically in nearly every other way. It aspires for the Altmanesque interplay of Nashville or Short Cuts but instead feels like one of those '70s disaster epics such as Earthquake or The Towering Inferno, in which a star-studded cast endures melodramatic story lines as the audience awaits the inevitable momentous event and tries to guess who will be around at the finish . . . It's easy to become swept up in the palpable enthusiasm Estevez shows toward his subject, but the pedestrian and overly expositional dialogue of the film's characters proves to be as stifling as the excerpts from Kennedy's speeches are stirring." -Deborah Young of Variety said of Estevez, "Stepping up as writer and director in a way he never has before, (he) successfully pulls together a complexly designed narrative," and added the film "carries an eerie topicality that makes many of its insights instantly click." Armond White of New York Press wrote that the film "has a humane sweetness", and that it "literally and vividly unites different ethnic groups, labor strata and social castes" in a way that "is not schematic—its exactitude and believability has a Tocquevillian brilliance." -Steve Persall of the St. Petersburg Times graded the film C, calling it "a misguided jumble of too much fiction, few facts and zero speculation" and Estevez "a mediocre filmmaker." Michael Medved, who was in the Ambassador ballroom (20 feet from the podium) the night Kennedy was shot, awarded the film three out of four stars and called it "intriguing but imperfect." He added, "Emilio Estevez gets most of the feelings of the occasion right. But, the melodramatic, multi-character format proves somewhat uneven and distracting." -Richard Roeper said, "Estevez writes and directs with lots of passion, not so much subtlety . . . (He) wants the movie to be on the level of a Robert Altman film like Nashville but falls short." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film one star and called it "trite fiction" and a work of "insipid ineptitude." He ranked it among the worst films of 2006, as did Lou Lumerick of the New York Post, who dubbed it an "ambitious, but utterly wrong-headed trivialization. --Cast: • Harry Belafonte as Nelson • Joy Bryant as Patricia • Nick Cannon as Dwayne Clark • Emilio Estevez as Tim Fallon • Laurence Fishburne as Edward Robinson • Lindsay Lohan as Diane Howser • Dave Fraunces as Robert F. Kennedy • Jeridan Frye as Ethel Kennedy • Spencer Garrett as David • Brian Geraghty as Jimmy • Heather Graham as Angela • Anthony Hopkins as John Casey • Helen Hunt as Samantha • Joshua Jackson as Wade Buckley • David Kobzantsev as Sirhan Sirhan • David Krumholtz as Agent Phil • Ashton Kutcher as Fisher • Shia LaBeouf as Cooper • William H. Macy as Paul Ebbers • Svetlana Metkina as Lenka • Demi Moore as Virginia Fallon • Freddy Rodriguez as José Rojas • Martin Sheen as Jack • Christian Slater as Daryl Timmons • Sharon Stone as Miriam Ebbers • Jacob Vargas as Miguel • Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Susan Taylor • Elijah Wood as William Avary

Bobby (2006): Dir: Emilio Estevez / Cast: William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Christian Slater, Anthony Hopkins, Lindsay Lohan: Intriguing ensemble drama regarding the events occurring during the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June of 1968. While the election is in full throttle a hotel prepares for the arrival of the Senator and the screenplay examines and explores various individuals involved. Emilio Estevez handles the difficult material evenly and is backed with a fantastic ensemble cast. William H. Macy plays the hotel manager in the midst of an affair. Christian Slater plays the head of kitchen staff who is fired for refusing a Mexican off time to vote. Demi Moore plays a drunken singer haunted with the reality of getting older. Anthony Hopkins plays a retired host who has seen it all during his long career but he sees the hotel as home. Lindsay Lohan is even given a great dramatic stretch as one of the hotel visitors. There is footage of Kennedy himself and his message of hope that was dispatched. However, this is not about Kennedy but about the people at the hotel during the event and how it effected them and seemingly brought them all together under one tragic moment. Despite their individual traumas the film stresses that it was the big picture around them that would haunted newspapers and embed our memories. Score: 10 / 10

Writer-director-co-star Emilio Estevez takes a tragic, emotional event in American history--the June 5th, 1968 assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan--and attempts to build a kaleidoscope of stories around it, giving personalities to the faces in the crowd that fateful night at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel. Curiously, Estevez chose not to focus on Kennedy (who is represented by newsreel footage), nor on Sirhan Sirhan, but on fictional (or fictionalized) characters such as a young couple marrying to keep the husband out of Vietnam; two young campaign workers who drop acid and spend the entire day goofing off; a Hispanic busboy at the hotel, fighting for equality and hoping to get the night off to see the Dodgers play; a beautician whose husband is cheating on her; and so on. With such a horrible tragedy looming over the third act of the picture, it's rather difficult to care about what color shoes Helen Hunt wears, or whether Lindsay Lohan's parents will turn up at her ceremony. Estevez has his heart in the right place (and his visual eye is impressive), but the screenplay is shallow and turgid, laughably underlined with a kind of political correctness which is supposed to make the picture seem relevant but is instead anachronistic. Star-studded cast generally fails to make an impression, though again this is the fault of the writing. ** from ****

The best part of Bobby is probably the ending. This is not to say the rest of the movie is bad. In fact, far from it. But the touching voice over of Robert Kennedy in the last 10 minutes of the movie exceeds the rest of the movie.The movie, in fact, is not much about Kennedy. It is about the inhabitants of the Ambassador hotel in the days leading up to the assassination. The ensemble of actors have done a wonderful job. Despite the large number of intertwining story lines, the director has done a good job of pulling us into the lives of each of the characters. There is the hotel worker, who, despite retirement cannot stay away from the hotel, and his fellow (old) friend. Then there is the soon to be bride, who is marrying a boy so that he may not be sent to the lines in the war. A starlet who has to perform at the ceremony, and her fractious relationship with her husband. The two campaign workers, who in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination, feel that Robert Kennedy may represent the last true hope for a peaceful Ameria. Among others, the cast of actors include Anthony Hopkins, Emilio Estevez (who also directed), Demi Moore, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Elijah Woods, Sharon Stone, William Macy.The culmination of the movie and Robert Kennedy's voice over makes you wonder, what just might have been, if both the Kennedy brothers had ruled the most powerful nation in the world. We would never know the answer to that, unfortunately.