The driving action in "Hidalgo" is a 3,000-mile race across the Arabian Desert, but the movie, which is based on Hopkins's tall tale of a life, strives to be a lot more. For starters, Hopkins is halfSioux, but he's been passing for a white guy, and the Indian lives he took at Wounded Knee have left him with a mean identity hangover.
In the years that follow, he and his spotted mustang Hidalgo join Buffalo Bill's traveling rodeo show, which also features Bill Cody (J.K. Simmons) and Annie Oakley (Elizabeth Berridge). In their hair and garish makeup, they look like clowns who've come down with consumption. But Hopkins, falling off Hidalgo in drunken oblivion, is still the crowd favorite.
Annoyed that Hopkins is brandishing Hidalgo as the world's best endurance horse, Sheikh Riyadh (Omar Sharif) wants the horseman to put up or shut up, more or less, and pay the fee to enter the Great Horse Race of the Bedouin. If he beats the sheik's unbeatable Al-Hattal, there is glory (for no non-Arab has ever entered) and a huge cash prize.
Hopkins consults with his mentor Chief Eagle Horn (Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman) about whether to take the dare, but he's there before you can say "Sandbiscuit." Yet there's so much off-course action along the way to the climactic race that crossing the finish line seems like an afterthought.
In prolonged pit stops, John Fusco's screenplay heats up a broth of Arabian intrigue. Should Al-Hattal win the race, the sheik will give his daughter Jazira (Zuleikha Robinson) to his stallion's royal jockey, Prince Bin Al Reeh (Said Taghmaoui), who already has four other wives. Jazira, meanwhile, is tired of hiding her face from men. She's tired of being told she can't ride her beloved Al-Hattal because she's a girl. In other words, she's a script revision away from "International Velvet."
When Jazira is kidnapped (yes, there's more plot), the sheik turns to Hopkins to rescue her. And it's here that the movie gets full of itself, having Mortensen lay down some "Western justice." Still, this side story does produce some nice old-Western, daytime photography by Shelly Johnson.
