Well, I've been through the desert on a horse with no name. And believe me, we got through it a lot faster than Hidalgo.
What is it about deserts anyway? From Ishtar to The Four Feathers, they've slowed movies down to a crawl and tempted directors to let films run for hours. It's like you get a little sand in the frame and you think you're shooting Lawrence Of Arabia.
Take Hidalgo -- a Disney movie in the take-the-kids sense about a larger-than-life horseman who, with his mustang Hidalgo, accepts a challenge from a rich sheikh to race the world's finest Arabians 3,000 miles across the Sahara. Cut to its essence, it could have been a raucous 90 minutes of horse-action, fightin' and shooting.
At two hours-plus, it has all that, spread out like oases across the desert. A stoic Viggo Mortensen plays Frank Hopkins, who in real life was a Pony Express rider and tall-tale teller such that almost everything about him was suspect -- his "part Red Indian" heritage, his friendship with Buffalo Bill and his claim to have won this race and others.
The movie takes this rogue and makes him a laconic haunted alcoholic, opening with the Wounded Knee massacre and only slowly clawing its way out of its melancholy. It does this in large part by playing its title character as Mr. Ed-like comic relief. Hidalgo shakes his head in disgust, he snorts for dramatic effect, rolls his eyes, gives sideways glances to his "buddy" Frank. In fact he gives a better overall performance than Mortensen.
What starts out as Dances With Wolves turns into a classic B serial when it hits the Middle East (scheming Arab stereotypes, nasty English villainess/femme fatale). Once in the desert, it lifts a bunch of warmed-over sand FX from The Mummy before settling into its endgame as a sandy Seabiscuit.
It's the cowboy-meets-Arabs part of the story that is most rousing, as if it just jumped out of a '40s serial. Tellingly, this part of the movie is most politically incorrect. To wit: a reluctant Frank catches the eye of Jazira (Zuleikha Robinson), the daughter of Sheikh Riyadh (Omar Sharif, who wields a scimitar with aplomb). In a moment of amorous intent, she lifts her veil to him -- the kind of situation American soldiers, for example, are encouraged to avoid in the Middle East these days.
This gets them into trouble with the sheikh, who is a stickler about the Koran. But you can count on Frank charming his way out of this harem (transgression) and its associated death sentence.
Director Joe Johnston definitely does justice to the Moroccan desert vistas. Just remember to bring some cold bottled water.
(This film is rated PG)
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