Hidalgo

Synopsis: It's 1890 and an American cowboy and his mustang, Hidalgo, famed for endurance riding, enter a 3,000 mile race across Arabia.

Hidalgo is a rollicking ‘boy’s own adventure’ story that is quite satisfying and even moving. It is one of those films that manages to overcome signs of being cooked up in a script factory and display an unexpectedly genuine emotional heart.

The opening titles assures us that Hidalgo was based on the true story of endurance rider Frank Hopkins. It ends with titles documenting Frank’s final years. Yet most of the story feels highly fantastic. Unsurprisingly, it transpires from a little web-browsing that none of the events in the film are likely to have happened. Yet this matters little to our enjoyment of the film.

Viggo Mortensen is a revelation! Well, no. But he makes a great cowboy. Perhaps the new Clint has arrived, with a very appealing touch of levity. He cuts a swathe through the film’s stereotypes, riding high on the real star, Hidalgo. The relationship between these two is the central strength of the film. Hidalgo is a wonderfully natural and intelligent presence on screen, and apparently is now being well-looked after by Viggo off-screen. I hope this is one celebrity couple that works out.

The story line is a mixture of the earnest and lighthearted, inflated almost to bursting point by a wildly over the top soundtrack. It opens with a massacre of an American Indian community in 1890, to which Hopkins is a helpless witness. Through an improbable sequence of events, he finds himself entering a 3,000 mile race around Arabia. Just as the landscape is reminding you of Lawrence of Arabia and the acting is suggesting something of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Omar Sharif suddenly pops into frame as the impressive Sheik Riyadh and saves the day. There are some interesting snippets of cross-racial and cross-cultural import, but by this stage I was more interested in the horse and the cinematography.

Overall, a ripping yarn with an edge.

 

 

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