Boaby, sorry, Bobby

Genius is an overused term these days. Anyone with a bit of flair or imagination gets tagged with it, like some desperate attempt to counteract all the nonentity "celebrities" constantly foisted upon us. "It's okay", they say, "because the useless twat I read Heat for was dubbed a genius on Jonathan Ross the other night". The current issue of NME asks on its front cover if that twonk from Razorlight's a genius. I've made my point. In cinema there's a similar term that gets overused, and ironically enough its genesis lies in a man that, when on his game, was a genius. That term is "Altmanesque".

You know the type of film that gets labeled this. Sprawling ensemble pieces with multi-narratives that intertwine at certain points, either to major or minor effect. Films like Nashville and Short Cuts, both directed by Robert Altman, hence the moniker for similar films. Boaby is just such a film. Whether it manages to do those "Altmanesque" things as well as they were done in the aforementioned films is debatable.

I'll start with Boaby's positives. For a first time director/writer this is a pretty impressive effort. It's tightly directed and well written. There's nothing too flashy about anything technical, something that can often bog down first time efforts. The flash comes in the shape of a starry cast, featuring the likes of Martin Sheen, William H. Macy and Frodo Baggins of the Shire. As you can expect the actings great, hell even the presence of Lyndsay Lohan, Sharon Stone and Anthony Hopkins Welsh-like American accent can't bring this side of it down as the first two are excellent and the latter doesn't get in the way enough to matter. Of course there is a reason for the good stuff. Boaby's written and directed by Emilio Estevez. The cast appears to be Estevez calling in some celebrity favours, a la Clooney directing Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind. As for the steady approach, the man knows movies. He's starred in the Mighty Ducks series!

The major problem with Boaby is the script. As well written as it is, most of the storylines basically go nowhere and the links between them, beyond the fact that all of the characters are present at the assassination of the other Kennedy. Apart from that they don't intertwine until the final scenes, and for most there is very little incident. I can't even tell you what the Martin Sheen/Helen Hunt storyline is about, apart from ill-fitting shoes. The most interesting ones are connected with the kitchen area of the hotel, as racial politics between white, Mexicans and blacks surface and Christian Slater's bastard boss steals the show, closely followed by Freddy Rodriguez and Larry Fishburne, doing his best Silver Surfer impression.

Boaby is one of those films that is perfectly enjoyable thanks to good acting and unobtrusive directing, but it really is about it. There are some pertinent points about everyone coming together as one and stuff like that, but everyone involved probably thinks it's more profound than it really is. Fair play to Estevez, he obviously feels strongly about his subject, and by choosing to let Boaby Kennedy speak for himself shows that the man's beliefs were admirable, but the execution of this movie somehow just doesn't sit right. Maybe if some of the storylines had been cut, and something more actually happened before the end, then this could have been a cracking movie. As it stands it's purely average.