Hidalgo

Disney’s rousing but padded action-adventure is based on the memoirs of Frank T. Hopkins, America’s most famous long-distance endurance horse rider. Hopkins’ self-described life and triumphs currently are being challenged by historians. But beyond this fact-vs.-fiction wrangling lurks an entertaining if crudely patched-together tale of American Indian genocide and one man’s redemptive quest for pride and honor. The half-Lakota Hopkins as portrayed here by The Lord of the Rings’ Viggo Mortensen worked as a dispatcher for the Army and witnessed the massacre at Wounded Knee. After escalating alcoholism mars his hitch with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the troubled cowboy enters a 3,000-mile race across the Arabian Desert that pits his Spanish mustang against 100 of the world’s finest Arabian thoroughbreds. The violence that upped the target age for the film includes the impaling of the title horse on a wooden spike. The film was directed by Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III).