If you were hoping for the conspiracy theory theatrics that made Oliver Stone's movie JFK so much fun, you would have been disappointed by Killing Kennedy, which is currently playing on the National Geographic Channel.
I was once stuck on plane next to man who professed a belief that the Twin Towers were blown up by George Bush - a popular delusion at the time. I tried my best to beat some sense into his nonsense but you may as well fly to the moon. Naturally he had serious doubts about the moon landing too. "What about JFK?" I asked, just to make sure he had the holy trinity locked down. "We'll it's pretty clear cut." Wow, I thought. He's not completely crazy after all. But I was wrong. "There were at least three gunmen" he continued undaunted, "and Oswald wasn't one of them."
The 'truth', to me at least, has always seemed pretty clear cut. Oswald did it. Like the existence of UFOs there's been no actual evidence to the contrary, also, I once saw a doco in which Oswald's brother said so. He said "it didn't surprise me at all that me did it, he was always a bit of a dick" - or words to that effect.
The one gunman theory is also the one favoured by Killing Kennedy, which by and large plays it straight - sitting somewhere between a better than average crime show recreation and the more animated moments of The Family Heath Diary. It's dull, but it gets the job done and it makes you think of Voltaren. Rob Lowe as JFK? Well he gets into the groove with a detached grimness and sticks with it for the entire film. Not so much range then, but even playing at one note Lowe somehow manages to make some music. The accent will always sound like a caricature, thanks in no small part to Mayor Quimby on The Simpsons.
Recent JFK impersonator Greg Kinnear was way better on the mini series The Kennedys, but Lowe probably added some pure star power to get the bums on seats. This bum got a bit numb though, which is not the fault of the actors so much as the leaden direction of a leaden script.
