Plot: What’s it about?
Watching “Hidalgo”, it’s kind of hard not to draw comparisons to something along the lines of “Lawrence of Arabia”. Naturally, though both star Omar Sharif, “Lawrence…” is a far superior movie, but “Hidalgo” isn’t without its charm – that is if you can suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours. But let’s look more on the surface for a minute, shall we? First, the movie stars ultra hot Viggo Mortensen (and I mean “ultra hot” as in “ultra popular” not as in good looking)! Coming off the success of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the movie was released just after “Return of the King” won an undeserved 11 Oscars, including one for Best Picture. That being said, I could draw a parallel a few years back to Leonardo DiCaprio’s follow up movie to “Titanic” which was “The Man in the Iron Mask”. It too was released at the height of his popularity and I’m sure the box office reflected his popularity at the time as opposed to the actual movie. Apart from that, the movie is best classified as a Western, an all but dead genre in modern=day Hollywood. In fact there are only a handful of actors today that can make a reliable Western (Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner come to mind). So with all “Hidalgo” had going for it, was it really that good or that bad
The truth is that it’s fairly entertaining, then again don’t think about it too hard and let the movie take you on a ride (no pun intended). Mortensen plays Frank Hopkins, a character in Buffalo Bill’s (played to a tee by J.K. Simmons) Wild West Show and a mail carrier. Hopkins has been billed as the greatest endurance rider/racer in the West, and this catches the attention of Sheikh Riyadh (Omar Sharif), who offers Hopkins a chance to compete in the “Ocean of Fire”, the greatest endurance race in the world. This race has been around for 3,000 years and until now, only Arabs had been able to compete in it. Hopkins and his trustworthy half breed Mustang, Hildago, must now compete against 100 other contestants who don’t want a foreigner to steal their title. There’s a sub plot with the Sheikh’s daughter (Zuleikha Robinson) who doesn’t wish to spend the rest of her life as a slave. If Hidalgo were to win, this wouldn’t happen to her. But for the most part, it’s “root for the underdog” time when we see the perils and challenges that Frank and Hidalgo must face in their 3,000 mile race to immortality.
“Hildago” also reminded me a lot of last year’s “Seabiscuit” and not just because both of them involved horses. The underlying message is that if you persevere and believe in yourself, you’ll succeed. That and the movie is based on face, so I suppose you could save yourself the cost of a rental and just look in an encyclopedia to see who won (though I think it’s pretty self-explanatory). Director Joe Johnston isn’t far out of his genre here. He’s better known for lavish sci-fi movies with plenty of special effects like “Jumanji” and “Jurassic Park III”; though he also helmed one of my favorite movies in “The Rocketeer”. There’s no denying that Johnston is out of his element here. In fact, I think he was the right choice to direct. Still, the overall quality of the movie is a bit predictable and, gaping plot holes aside, it is entertaining if you sit back and suspend your disbelief. At 135 minutes, I feel it’s about twenty minutes too long. Today’s audiences aren’t really excited about movies that take up an entire afternoon. Still, “Hidalgo” will most likely find a much broader audience on DVD than it did in the theaters. Mortensen isn’t bad, but he doesn’t seem too convincing as a “Westerner”. Then again, that’s just my opinion.
Video: How does it look?
“Hidalgo” is presented in a very unique way on screen. The 2.35:1 anamorphic image looks good at times and bad at others. The physical look of the film goes from natural (when in America at the Wild West Show) to a very oversaturated, somewhat polarized look for the rest of the movie. If you can imagine the movie “Three Kings”, it looks like that. We have blue skies that look nearly black at the top of the screen, white, washed out faces, etc. This does add a very unique element to the way it looks and when a “normal” scene is shown, we tend to think that the color is off. Still, I noticed some edge enhancement in several scenes, not too much, but still enough that it was noticed. I feel the inclusion of a Dolby Digital 5.1 track and a DTS track plus the length of the movie might have compromised the quality of the picture. Still, for the most part it looks great and viewers should be happy with it.
Audio: How does it sound?
Now the audio, on the other hand, well this is what we refer to when we say “reference quality”. I found this to be a very engaging, dynamic track. I chose to listen to the DTS track on my initial viewing and then went back and listened to some key scenes in Dolby Digital. While they both sound great, I’m going to give the edge to DTS (big surprise) here. Several times during the movie I felt the surrounds kick in and add some extra ambiance to the scene. Things like bullets flying by, horses running (you’ll get a LOT of that) and sand storms really sound great no matter which track you pick. With nearly every disc coming out that has a 5.1 soundtrack, this truly separates the “good” soundtracks from the great. Audio wise, “Hidalgo” delivers.
Supplements: What are the extras?
As far as supplements go, there’s not a lot offered here. First up is a featurette entitled “Sand & Celluloid”, which focuses on the special effects of the movie. It’s not your typical “Making of…” featurette, but there’s some pretty interesting stuff here. The sandstorm, obviously, is the focus of the supplement. There’s some DVD-ROM material as well in which we learn about the history of the mustang (then and now), no it’s not just a car! No trailer can be found for this movie, but Disney has included their usual previews (that can be skipped) before the movie.
