BEATING A DEAD HORSE
THE TRUE STORY BEHIND DISNEY'S "HIDALGO"

The premise behind Hidalgo is interesting. Frank Hopkins, a famous Pony Express rider, is chosen to compete with his "impure" Mustang in a 3,000 mile race across the Sahara Desert. I'm a sucker for true survival stories, but anyone's a sucker for thinking the film is true at all.

Apparently everything from Hopkins background, from his Indian bloodline, to his time as a cast member in Buffalo Bill's Wild West is dubious. The famed desert race the film revolves around may not have ever existed as well. Don Blazer writes in an article from The Horsemen's Corral:

"Hopkins claimed he was a ‘star and ringmaster’ in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show for 32 years.

Dr. Juti Winchester, curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center says, “We are unable to find any Frank T. Hopkins in our database of known cast members, acquaintances, employees, or friends of Colonel Cody.”

Finally, about winning the 3,000 mile race in Arabia, Dr. Awd Al-Badi, director of research, King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies says, “There is absolutely no record or reference to Hopkins, with or without his mustangs, ever having set foot on Arabian soil. The idea of a historic long distance Arab horse race is pure nonsense.”

Larry Hewitt, a director of The National Association of Competitive Mountaineering writes on his site (nacmo.org):

"There was no Hidalgo, and Hopkins, who crafted the initial stories over the years, was never a rider with the Pony Express, never appeared in the Wild West Shows, and there was never a 1,000 year old 3,000 mile Oceans of Fire race in Arabia. These stories had merely been told and retold based on Hopkins' hoax, with none of the subsequent writers ever bothering to conduct research into their validity.

Disney was caught in a bald-faced lie. Their response - typically corporate America. To quote Disney's publicist, Nina Heyn: "No one here really cares about the historical aspects... It has little to do with reality." Yet billing it as based on fact has been the cornerstone of the Disney marketing machine. To quote Professor David Dary, a recipient of the Cowboy Hall of Fame Wrangler Award and published author on the American West, "To misrepresent to the motion picture viewing public that the upcoming film is a 'true story' is not only misleading, it also raises a serious question about the credibility of the Disney organization." The recent resignation of Roy Disney from the board of directors, the last Disney family member to have a board position at the mega-corporation, simply serves to reinforce this opinion.

Certainly other films have used the "true story" angle erroneously, such as The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even Return of The Living Dead, but with a tongue and cheek manner that is more of a tribute or inside joke than something that's genuinely deceitful.

So accepting the story may not be a true one, is it still a good one? Though not awful, it's hardly a great film by any measure.

The entire film is a mish-mash of other movies. You've got the Native American sentimentality of Dances With Wolves, mixed with Indiana Jones style action scenes (though they end up being more like Romancing The Stone) with liberal doses of The Cannonball Run mixed in. Even the special effects featuring a dust storm and a locust swarm look as if they were cut and pasted straight from The Mummy series.

Had the movie been simplified as an elemental struggle with a man and his horse against impossible odds it may have worked better, but by throwing in sub plots like rescuing the daughter of the Sheikh before sundown to avoid castration was flat out ridiculous.

As the Sheikh, Omar Shariff is very charming and eats up the screen every moment he's on it. And at 72 he believably pulls off some decent swordfight scenes.

There's some cameos in the film that are pretty fun, too. JK Simmons is a great Buffalo Bill Cody, and the nearly forgotten C. Thomas "Pony Boy" Howell has a nice (albeit brief) turn as a prissy horse racer in the film's beginning.

The horse is given some nice personality, too, snorting and huffing for dramatic effect to compliment Viggo's dialogue.  Though screenwriter Joe Fusco did a much better job with his earlier horse pic, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

With Viggo Mortensen fresh off his long stint in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, you'd think he'd have reached a bit further than to settle for yet another grizzled adventurer on a danger filled journey with this sub par flick. Though it's great to see him carry a major film again (he certainly has that younger Harrison Ford quality that can take him far), to see him play such an empty, shallow character after achieving such greatness is a disappointment. Though I suppose that's a tribute to Peter Jackson and we'll say that of any actor from that trilogy, save Ian McKellan for our their future work.

The motivation for the character is confusing as well. When Hopkins, in The Pony Express, delivers the orders that result in the Indian slaughter at Wounded Knee, he descends into alcoholism and has nightmares about it. So the way he deals with them is by entering a race to win $100,000? I don't buy it.

There's really no clear "bad guy" in the film, either. Without spoiling it, the antagonist that attempts to sabotage his attempts to win the race is neither punished, or revealed to the hero as a villain, either, leaving for a very unsatisfying conclusion.

Hidalgo might be worth a rent, but there's certainly much better movies out there to spend your hard earned cash on.

-Robert
rberry@retrocrush.com

retroCRUSH Rating: 2 OUT OF 5 MARTINI GLASSES