I should have known better, but for some reason, I was led to believe that Hidalgo was going to be some sort of Indiana Jones or The Mummy type of deal. You know, action hero Viggo. I was wrong, terribly wrong. Hidalgo is a horse movie. The title of the movie is not The Adventures of Frank Hopkins, nor is it The Great Arabian Race, it’s Hidalgo. Hidalgo the horse.

Hidalgo is even more of a horse movie than Seabiscuit was. It’s all about horses and the horsy things horses do, at least most of it. The other part of the movie deals with Hidalgo’s jockey, Frank Hopkins (Viggo Mortensen). An all-American cowboy with a pony express horse, Frank is invited to compete in a cross-continent race across the Arabian deserts.

Hoping for a load of cash, Frank joins the race as the only American. Could be fun, except it’s a good 45 minutes before the race begins. Before the race we get an unnecessary lengthy background involving slaughtered Indians, a cowboy road show and lots of soap-opera stuff going on behind the scenes of the race. Lots of different people want to win the cash prize, and are even willing to break the rules in order to win, and so we have all this built up tension about the dangerous situation that Frank is getting himself into. Except it’s not that tense.

The race finally starts, and we get lots of shots of lots of horses running around. Multiple dangers befall Frank of course, from sand storms to corrupt racers. One subplot deals with an Arabian princess who falls in love with Frank but gets captured by bad guys, and Frank is the one to rescue her. It’s all a bunch of stuff that could be fun and exciting but rarely is. The stock Arabian bad guys are often difficult to tell apart from each other and Frank Hopkins doesn’t gather much sympathy as a good-hearted but ultimately lifeless character.

There’s lots of action in the script, but the interspersed action sequences are rarely exciting and don’t make up for the lulls that come between them. Basically, there’s nothing here to keep us genuinely interested, that is, unless you like horses.

Year: