FilmBlather.com

"You survived the sandstorm! Allah must have a more severe judgement awaiting you."

Okay, guys, look here. For the last time: I don't care for political correctness, or about it. If you ask me, filmmakers should be able to offend anyone they want, as much as they want. Everything is fair game. But I don't much care for stupidity either, and though "offensive" isn't in itself a pejorative, when a movie is dumb and offensive, it is somehow worse than simply being dumb. To put it another way, if you're going to piss people off, there had better be a point behind it -- make it funny, or incisive, or insightful, or something. If you don't, I still don't care, but I don't like you, either.

Hidalgo, Viggo Mortensen's first movie since his legendary turn as Aragorn, son of Arathorn, isn't without redeeming elements, but it is also thoughtless and hideously imperialist. Much of the proceedings take place in the Middle East, and the manner in which the film persistently and pointlessly insults its Arab characters, doing everything possible to stomp on their culture and identity, is offputting. Not to mention the fact that at one point, I swear it makes a joke out of slave children. Funny ha-ha.

Then, of course, there is the matter of this particular "true story" most likely being a hoax -- a fact that Disney knows but refuses to acknowledge. Frank T. Hopkins, our intrepid protagonist, did in fact write a series of "autobiographical" manuscripts detailing his adventures in endurance horse racing, serious questions have been raised about their validity; indeed, the Great Horse Race of the Bedouin, which is the subject of this film, seems to never have existed.

As disingenuous as it is of Disney to persist in their "based on a true story" assertion, a movie is a movie, and we must go from there. Hidalgo is the name of Hopkins' horse, an impure mustang that nevertheless manages to win every long-distance race on American soil, leading Hopkins and the carnival show that employs him to claim that he is the greatest endurance-racing horse in the world. This is perceived as a challenge by the Sheikh Riyadh (Omar Sharif), who holds an annual 3000 mile race across the treacherous Arabian Desert. He sends a couple of henchmen to America to tell Hopkins to either surrender the title or enter the race against their champion, a purebred, beautiful, and very valuable animal.

Everyone scoffs at a white man attempting to compete in the great race, and it would seem to be a certainty that he will be one of the first to collapse and die -- no prizes for guessing whether or not he actually is. There are others who have a great financial interest in winning the race -- among them the Lady Davenport (Louise Lombard), who mostly just sits in her tent and looks on nefariously -- and others still with personal stakes, familial issues and aims of vengeance, so a simple test of physical endurance this will not be. And can an Arabian adventure ever not have an exotic princess to rescue?

I like horses, and I liked most of the horse-related business here. Interesting that the filmmakers make somewhat of an effort not to anthropomorphize Hidalgo, making him an actual horse rather than a human being that looks like one. There is a simple, stunning moment late in the film when you see Hidalgo simply get up off the ground, a perfect moment in what is -- or should have been -- after all, a movie about a man and his horse.

Unfortunately, there is also heaps of extraneous nonsense -- all the business with the princess, for example, or the fact that the Sheikh may be an Arab, but he's an American at heart, wanting nothing more than to read pulp westerns and receive a Colt firearm for his collection, because of course revolvers are the coolest thing ever. He must be a good guy, you see, because he likes the same things we like. Wait, what? You don't like guns? What kind of American are you?!

Does Hopkins win the Big Race? I'll say this: if there's one thing I learned from Hidalgo, it's that Americans are undeniably better than Arabs.