Hidalgo
 I can’t help
myself -- I’m a sucker for Westerns. They don’t even have to be all that good,
though I think a bad oater should automatically start life with a rating a star higher
than a poor movie of any other genre. Heck, I’d watch a movie of John Wayne riding a
horse for two hours -- three, if John Ford filmed it.
But I think my favorite category of cowboy movie is the
fish-out-of-water flick -- whether it’s a city boy coming to the West (The
Virginian) or a cowboy going somewhere else (the very underrated Quigley Down Under).
The latter is the subcategory Hidalgo falls into. One part Dances With Wolves,
one part Lawrence of Arabia, it was thoroughly panned in theatrical release, but
it’s worth seeking out on DVD.
Frank T. Hopkins (Viggo Mortensen) is a broken-down cowpoke
working the circuit for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, billed as the world’s
greatest endurance rider. He certainly seems to believe his own hype, and that irritates a
visiting sheikh, who challenges him to enter a 3500-mile race across a section of the
Sahara known as "The Ocean of Fire." Hopkins consents, and he and his cowpony,
Hidalgo, set off on an epic adventure.
This is where you’re going to have to make a judgment
call. If you don’t like taciturn loner heroes who love their horses, if you
aren’t stirred even a little by exotic desert princesses, grueling feats of courage,
and a goodly amount of derring-do, Hidalgo will bore you to tears. But if, like me,
you wish Errol Flynn had made a bunch more movies and you wouldn’t have minded if
Peter Weir had filmed ’em, then you’ll be fine.
'Cause there’s a lot more of Hidalgo than there
probably ought to be -- I suspect it could have been cut by a third and been the better
for it, certainly in terms of pacing. Probably in terms of plot, too, since the movie
suffers a bit from the kitchen-sink school of plotting. Desert race not enough? Let’s
make the horse a mixed-breed pony facing purebred Arabians! Heck, let’s make Hopkins
half Native American, just in case the point isn’t obvious! And . . . and . . . and .
. .
I don’t care. This is one good-looking movie.
Cinematographer Shelly Johnson filmed on location in Morocco, Montana, and South Dakota,
and they all look spectacular. Industrial Light & Magic supplied a rip-roaring
(literally) sand storm -- and there’s Mortensen, who looks as though his visage ought
to be carved into the Black Hills somewhere. Even if he weren’t a fine actor,
he’d be worth looking at. The horse ain’t bad-looking, either.
The picture could be better, however. The video transfer
seems a tad grainy and, in places, washed out. A friend suggests that the color saturation
mirrors Hopkins’ mental state, but I suspect that the flick is probably too long for
a single disc, so the bit rate is low (it has both DD and DTS soundtracks) -- or
something. I don’t buy the "mental state" argument at all.
The picture is anamorphic and admirably widescreen. I
didn’t see Hidalgo in the theater, but I imagine that what Johnson shot could
look a lot better than it does here. I just hope we don’t have to sit through an
extended director’s cut to see it.
The sound is extremely good in both DD and DTS, although I
marginally prefer the DTS. And there’s one sound effect involving a locomotive that I
suspect I’ll be hearing a lot of in demonstrations at A/V shows, which will be a nice
relief from the Saturn V launch from Apollo 13. It is fun, if your
system’s up to it.
And that’s not a bad assessment of the movie as a
whole: It may well not be your cup of tea, but if you’ve got the endurance and
you’re in the mood for an adventure flick, Western subgenre, the way they used to
make ’em, Hidalgo is fun.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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