'Killing Kennedy' review: No news here

Yet something got lost from the page -- O'Reilly and Dugard know how to set down prose that forces the rapid turning of those things -- to the screen. Even guts can't quite rescue this. Not that "Killing Kennedy" is bad -- it's not -- but the whole film feels like it's been staged in a small box as opposed to a world stage where seemingly minor events would assume such tragic consequence and reverberate to this day. Instead, "Killing Kennedy" is cramped and confined: a small-bore docudrama that tells us everything we already knew anyway.

Moreover, Lowe, a good actor, nevertheless can't quite pull off the illusion that needs to be pulled off here -- that JFK is not being impersonated by someone who looks and sounds like Rob Lowe. He's a relatively small part of this story, anyway. Most screen-time goes to Rothhaar's Oswald -- a petulant dweeb who's as menacing as a Starbuck's clerk. Rothhaar can't even begin to capture the Oswald of popular imagination -- a monster with a smirk and a snarl. (But then, who could?)

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