Having masterminded a miraculously swashbuckling escape from career quagmire (the lacklustre A Perfect Murder anyone? No? How about the unendurable G.I. Jane?) Viggo Mortensen has clearly decided that straightforward stand-offs between good and evil are where it’s at. So he’s only gone attached himself to a project more ethically quaint than Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy. Hidalgo is an equine adventure drawn from the life of some cowboy or other where individuality takes on autonomy and wins by several furlongs. There are even gratuitous shots of the Statue of Liberty to underscore the point.
Viggo essays a rugged bovine-enabler, Frank T. Hopkins, who in true post-PC fashion is secretly half-Native American. Ah-ha, we’re all supposed to think, so that explains his uncanny riding abilities and his almost disquieting dedication to the eponymous mustang Hidalgo. And indeed, we’re quite right – so much so that Hopkins is snapped up firstly by Bill Cody’s travelling Wild West show and then invited to race in a gruelling Middle-Eastern 3,000 mile desert trek – a sort of Cannonball Run on hooves.
Soon things are going swimmingly well, excepting the scornful derision of a super-stallion breeding sheik (Sharif) and his equally swarthy assistants. As they snort and suggest that Viggo’s beast take himself off to the nearest glue factory, Hildalgo stealthily takes the pole position and attracts adoration from an Arabian princess. Alas, between the stereotypically shifty foreign blighters and the competing English toff, there seem to be no end of race-fixing candidates (what a thoroughly novel notion…) and so our hero must brave desert sun, dehydration and the twisted efforts of a bizarre cast of characters that appear to have wandered in from some discarded Jules Verne novel.
Hidalgo eventually settles into a likable enough matinee-orientated, Indiana Jones-light groove, but while director Jackson (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III) struggles to fashion something approximating the epic sweep of Lawrence Of Arabia, the screenplay is just too lean to be David Lean, and you have to wonder how they managed to lure Omar from the Bridge tables of Monte Carlo with such an uneventful project. Then again, he did pop up in Funny Lady.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, this propensity for tedium, Hidalgo retains a kind of old-fashioned charm – what with Viggo going all Clint Eastwood and those bulging, swelling strings on the soundtrack. And then there’s the exotic gymkhana appeal. It has to be said that the horses are absolutely banging, and the lead pony is an odds-on certainty for cutesy animal performance of the year – humblest apologies to Seabiscuit and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
Oh, and Mr. Mortensen gets to speak in Sioux. Factoring in his established capacity for the Elfish tongue, all he now needs are a few Klingon lessons and he’ll be all set for a thrilling life discussing extinct (or phoney) dialects with the fan-boy convention brigade. Let the good times roll!
136 mins. cert 12pg. opens April 16