Hidalgo
By Edith
Alderette
First appeared San Francisco Examiner
A legendary Pony Express rider enters
himself and his beloved mustang in the world’s most dangerous race
across the Saudi desert, facing threat to life and limb from cataclysmic
environmental forces and villainous conspiracies to win a king’s
ransom in prize money. Simply put, Hidalgo, should have been
an awe-inspiring tale of true grit and personal perseverance.
Sadly, the story of Frank T. Hopkins, his horse, and
the fantastic odds they beat to win the contest is appallingly bungled
on many levels. Besides the fact that numerous experts on the subject
say the entire tale is a complete fabrication, Hidalgo is a poorly
executed dog-and-pony show — minus the dog.
Shame on Disney and Touchstone Pictures for touting
it as a real-life biopic.
Hidalgo, even with its shortcomings as a “true
story,” has all the earmarks of a great film. The story, an interesting
concoction of Indiana Jones meets Seabiscuit, has the
potential of being deep, textured, and thrilling. The settings —
in the Old West, on trans-Atlantic steamer ships, in the Persian desert
surrounded by Bedouin aristocracy and their magnificent Arabian steeds
— are expansive and exotic. The special effects, including spectacular,
deadly dust storms and near-biblical swarms of locusts, are respectable
and used fairly well. The cast, including Viggo Mortensen (Lord of
the Rings trilogy) and Omar Sharif (Funny Girl, Dr.
Zhivago), certainly have the talent and poise to carry a dramatic
and exciting epic of this scale.
Yet somewhere between Frank Hopkins’ tall tales
and post production on Hidalgo, the wheels fell off this film.
The dialogue is so predictable and anemic the actors don’t have
much of a chance to breathe any life into it. The story line is jumbled
and chopped by an apparent hack job in the editing room so one can hardly
understand it. The sound is sometimes so garbled and badly balanced that
Hopkins’ mumblings and cowboy platitudes are indecipherable above
the background score.
Continuity is also almost completely absent in Hidalgo.
One minute Hopkins lies belly-up to the sky, exhausted, dehydrated, and
hallucinating as his horse keels over, bleeding from the nose and in the
throes of death. Miraculously, a few moments later, the pair run all out
at breakneck speed for the finish line, passing up other racers and horses
who are in far better shape, even managing a jaunty victory lap around
a celebrating crowd.
But that’s not the most obvious misstep in Hidalgo.
Someone seriously dropped the ball in post production because entire sections
of the film are repeated, as if someone didn’t bother to screen
the film before sending it out for final printing.
It almost seems that this was a good movie until an
amateur post-production house got its hands on it.
The set up to the race, in which the world’s most illustrious and
well-heeled Arabian thoroughbreds race 3,000 miles across a desert thick
with dust storms, quicksand, and searing heat, is sacrificed for some
passable special effects and pointless interplay between characters. Hopkins
(Mortensen), born of a white father and an Sioux mother, sinks in a sea
of guilt and booze after he unknowingly delivers the dispatch ordering
the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, and great pains are made by director
Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III) to drive that
point home.
Hopkins and Hidalgo take up as performers with Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West Show, which touts the pair as the greatest long-distance
racing team in the world. The title irritates the Sheik Riyadh (Sharif),
who hosts the Ocean of Fire race across the Arabian Desert, and he challenges
Hopkins and his pony to enter the contest — the first time a low-bred
horse and a foreign rider are allowed to compete in the centuries-old
race.
Along the way Hopkins encounters the sheik’s daughter
(Zuleikha Robinson), who develops a bit of a thing for the rugged American
cowboy, and an English blue-blood, Lady Davenport (Louise Lombard), who’s
willing to carry out any underhanded scheme possible to insure victory
for her prize mare.
Mortensen, who tends to come off as a cool, reserved
type in all his roles, doesn’t change tacks for Hidalgo.
He’s quiet and brooding, but when a man of few words talks, those
words should at least be a little interesting. Without a sharp dialogue
or more than the occasional “Don’t mess with my horse,”
he doesn’t really make for a character you believe or can root for.
Sharif, as always, pulls off the role of mysterious,
foreign aristocracy admirably, but his character is written so poorly
he can hardly make it work. Somehow, writer John Fusco would have us believe
that the ruler of a brutal Islamic land in the 1800s could be a forward-thinking
borderline feminist. Or that his daughter, whose face could never be shown
to a man other than her father or husband under penalty of death, would
bare herself to an American, even if he had won a horserace.
In the end, Hidalgo completely lacks the nobility,
statue, and credibility due such an amazing story, even if it is an old
man’s folly. This is a lame nag of a movie that should have been
put down long before it hit theaters.
©2004 Edith Alderette,
All Rights Reserved
|
