Hidalgo (2004)

C+ SDG

Like the bald-faced whoppers of cowboy Frank Hopkins on which it is based, Hidalgo is fitfully entertaining hokum as long as it isn’t taken too seriously. Hopkins’ wild claims — that he was half-Sioux, that he witnessed the massacre at Wounded Knee, that he starred in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, and most spectacularly that he participated in and won a non-existent thousand-year-old Arabian long-distance horse race across three thousand miles of desert — have been thoroughly debunked, but Hidalgo is Hopkins’ version of his own story, and he’s sticking to it.

Buy at Amazon.com
Directed by Joe Johnston. Viggo Mortensen, Zuleikha Robinson, Omar Sharif, Louise Lombard, Adam Alexi-Malle. Disney.

Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/Spiritual Value

-1

Age Appropriateness

Teens & Up

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Caveat Spectator

Sometimes fatal action violence; mild innuendo; fleeting pop American Indian spirituality.

Viggo Mortensen, back in the saddle in his first post-Aragorn role, is entertaining as the laconic, disarmingly soft-spoken cowboy hero called "Far Rider" by the American Indians in honor of his fleet-footed mustang Hidalgo. Remarkably, Disney doesn’t whitewash the more politically incorrect elements of Hopkins’ tale: The Arabs Hopkins meets are sophisticated and well-bred but also imperious, condescending to non-Muslim "infidels," slighting to their women, callous to slave trade, and in some cases duplicitous and murderous — though others are loyal and honorable, and there’s also an explicitly identified "Christian" (i.e., European) character who’s a villain.

The film is too slow getting started, but picks up after the long first act, livening up the desert race with attacks by raiders, a swashbuckling rescue mission, a Mummy-style sandstorm, and a harrowing assassination attempt involving deadly snares and wild animals. In the end, while this trip may not have been really necessary, it’s not a complete waste of time either.

P.S. Like Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, also written by horse lover — and self-professed "honorary Oglala-Lakota tribe member"! — John Fusco, Hidalgo ends by suggesting that horses are wild things that really want to run free. Fusco’s got 22 mustangs on his New England farm; when’s he going to open the corral gate and let them run into the sunset?

Action, Adventure, Horses