The assassination of Bobby Kennedy as he spoke at LA's Ambassador Hotel after winning the Californian primary in June 1968, was as great a tragedy for America as the earlier shooting of his brother. The result was the emergence of Richard Nixon, eventually to be disgraced.
Kennedy's theme that night was to unite America against the violence of the time, and Emilio Estevez's film points up plenty of parallels for today.
But, in attempting to fictionalise the stories of those who were in the ballroom that night, the film frequently loses focus and strength.
The moment we see documentary footage of Kennedy himself, it instantly springs to life. This was a man who might well have made a great liberal President, unafraid to tell America a good few home truths and idolised by those who supported him.
What we watch for most of the time makes a curiously manufactured and unpolitical movie. There are a number of good performances from a bevy of familiar faces.
Lindsay Lohan decides to marry classmate Elijah Wood in order to save him from a tour of Vietnam. Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte play two retired veterans who don't really know what's going on any more.
Youthful campaigners Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty are turned on to LSD by hippy Ashton Kutcher, and Christian Slater gets sacked for being nasty to the Mexican workforce.
Much the best of these undercooked cameos come from Sharon Stone, as the hairdresser wife of William H Macy, devastated by the fact that he's having an affair (with Heather Graham's switchboard operator); and from Demi Moore as the alcoholic singer whose boyfriend (Estevez himself) is trying to save her from herself.
But the real star of the film is Bobby Kennedy himself, a politician determined to carry on where his brother left off, and with the intelligence and charisma to do it.
We, of course, know how the story will end. But it still comes as a palpable shock when busboy Sirhan Sirhan pulls his gun.
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Using his haunting elegy for Martin Luther King over the final scene, Estevez makes most of what's gone before seem entertaining enough but fairly trivial. This is not, after all, Grand Hotel.
Bobby
Cert: 15
