Hidalgo review

2004.03.12 — Entertainment | Movies | Movie Reviews | by Andrew Cole

Hidalgo reaches out to the adventurer in us, the cowboy, and asks us to come along for a ride. That ride turns out to be pleasant, but not especially memorable.

The film stars Viggo Mortensen, fresh from success in the Lord of the Rings movies, as Frank Hopkins, the best long distance rider (and tall tale teller) that ever strapped on a pair of spurs.

Directed by Joe Johnston, who also gave us Jumanji and The Rocketeer, the film echoes the Star Wars and Indiana Jones adventures where Johnston got his start in art direction. It was written by John Fusco and has more than a little flavor of his earlier Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Young Guns.

As you might guess, Hidalgo feels very familiar, even generating a bit of deja vu for The Last Samurai in its flashbacks and in its wild west show, where Hopkins has found a job drunkenly reenacting some of his exploits. With a perfunctory and ill-motivated segué, we leap to Arabia, where Hopkins enters the fabled race across the desert.

This cowboy-in-Arabia thing is new ground, but the film steadfastly refuses to break it. There's no point where the story really goes wrong; but it's hard to love the heroes and hard to keep the villains straight. They are all broad characters of the sort we would expect in a Hollywood Arabs, with flowing robes, dire warnings, sneers of "infidel," and leering treachery. Yet it's not even as much fun as that sounds.

As with any race flick, the bad guys are arrogant cheaters and our hero holds with the wisdom that "slow and steady wins the race." He even stops to help an injured competitor, in the very best of race movie tradition. So we are not surprised to find our hero on his last legs, teetering on the edge of doom, when a rival sparks his competitive spirit and has him off at a gallop again, newly-invigorated somehow, for the final rush to victory.

Mortensen does an admirable job as the tight-lipped cowboy, altho his chastity is a bit tiring. His main difficulty is that his character of Hopkins never seems to be having much fun. And yet neither is the race some ultimate test of his character or willpower. It's hard to see his motivation for enduring the drama.

Some of the hijinks surrounding the race are interesting. In true pulp fashion, Hopkins and Hidalgo rescue Arabian damsels, get captured and threatened with neutering (a scene that a young Harrison Ford would have chewed up and swallowed greedily), and more; and here Mortensen seems to be enjoying himself. But the supporting characters are all painted backdrops to play against and offer little interest or even color.

The one exception is Omar Sharif as the sheikh. He is interesting, conflicted, humorous, caring, hopeful, angry, and vindictive—sometimes all at once. Louise Lombard is a cool breeze as the British horse breeder, but she's given too little to do, and her character is never resolved. Zuleikha Robinson is the damsel, but she is likewise too passive to be much fun.

The movie tries to be a bit profound at times, drilling us relentlessly about how Hidalgo (and, of course, Hopkins) is not of pure blood. It's quickly tiresome and rather patronizing.

This is ultimately the story of a man and his horse. But as such it should have been something of a buddy picture, and it's not. It is pleasant and sometimes amusing (as when the goat thief is forced to act as Hopkins' assistant, but at times it is slow (death to a pulp adventure) and there are subplots that fall flat. Hopkins buys a black slave boy... and puts him to work. His story is never resolved. He wins the race (sorry to spoil that if you hadn't guessed already) and has no one to celebrate with.

Hidalgo could have been a rollicking roller coaster of a pulp adventure, but it never quite has the guts to leave the improbable and explore the preposterous, where we might have had a lot more fun.

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