Hearing that a Bobby Kennedy prestige picture was planned for the 2006 awards season, movie fans must have assumed someone like Oliver Stone was at the helm, someone with the pedigree to bring this sacred American icon to the big screen. Emilio Estevez might not have been the last writer-director they envisioned, but with B-movies like Men at Work and Rated X to his credit, he had to be pretty low on the list of logical guesses. As it turns out, every skepticism about his ability is totally justified. Bobby is a shallow mess of an ensemble picture, a protracted session of melodrama that thematically over-stretches from start to finish. It wasn't a bad idea to measure Kennedy's impact by taking the country's temperature on the day he was assassinated, with the presidential candidate appearing only as a tangential figure in newsreel footage. But Estevez's execution is seriously wanting. It's not for a lack of willing participants -- in fact, this might be one of the most powerhouse casts ever assembled, with all manner of performers eager to join in for some politically well-intentioned Robert Altman-lite. Making do with one-third of the characters might have helped, if only because each is the personification of some heavy-handed social issue Estevez wants to shoe-horn in. What's more insufferable is how Estevez imagines these issues mirrored in today's society, making this a self-important metaphorical criticism of the Iraq War, immigration, and other modern ills. Among the tired characters Estevez trots out are the hippie drug dealer (Ashton Kutcher), the boozy lounge singer (Demi Moore), the drafted youth on the eve of his enlistment (Elijah Wood), and a bickering kitchen staff whose on-the-nose dialogue boils over with race-baiting. The Hollywood Foreign Press gifted Bobby with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture; rightfully, Oscar did not follow suit.