Overabundance/Absence

Bobby wants very hard to be a political statement, and even includes soundbites and clips of Robert Kennedy's speeches and public appearances. Ostensibly about how a number of disparate individuals are affected by witnessing his assassination and reflecting the political climate and social environment of the time, it does neither well. Really, it's not easy to delve into each character when there's so many of them, and even the all-star cast fails to give realistic life to their paper-thin roles. The overabundance of plot lines and story arcs just creates a mess that you don't really care about, given that so few of the characters feel like real human beings as opposed to stock cliches and sketches. In the end, it's not really about how the Event affects them, but about a day in their lives that builds up to that event, and even the fallout is truncated. It doesn't know what it wants to say, and ends up seeming to try to hard to tack Themes of Relevance onto a patchwork of recycled elements.

Not to say that there isn't anything worthwhile in there. A standout is Sharon Stone as the beautician wife of cheating hotel manager William H. Macy, who manages to bring pathos and vulnerability to her role while playing against type. The climax is well executed as well, but apart from that, there's little to be satisfied about.

While Bobby has an overabundance of Plots and Themes, some other movies happily prefer to exist with an absence of either. Movies like Ghost Rider, for instance. Given that the director has a track record that includes the abyssmal Daredevil, it's not really a surprise. The only unexpected thing is that he manages to make this mess even more unwatchable than the former.

There's really no point wasting time and effort writing about everything that was wrong about the flick. Suffice to say that nothing makes sense, it's boring and by the numbers, the CGI is awful, and the only thing that's even remotely interesting are the little quirks that Nicolas Cage gives Johnny Blaze, which I'm not even sure are supposed to be there in the first place. It's not even fun, because it takes itself way too seriously, with a portentious voiceover and over-elevated view of the "Ghost Rider Mythos", if such a thing even exists in the first place. Bottom line: Stay far, far away.