 If many critics are willing to give S&H the benefit of a doubt, several are not so willing to give Hidalgo the same. To Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, it's "much too long, primitively plotted." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post writes that it "suffers from weird shifts in tone, offensively outdated stereotypes, a cumbersome subplot - and a supposedly fact-based story that bears only a nodding acquaintance with reality." Desson Thomson in the Washington Post observes that the filmmakers were apparently attempting to produce an epic on the order of Lawrence of Arabia. "But Lawrence this ain't; not by a long shot, and certainly not by a dromedary's nose hair. If it weren't for Sharif's extraordinary presence, there wouldn't be a cherishable moment in the movie." Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune calls it "a would-be mix of Seabiscuit and that turns into something closer to The Mummy on horseback." The film does have a handful of defenders, including Roger Ebert, who writes in the Chicago Sun-Times: "Hidalgo is the kind of movie Hollywood has almost become too jaundiced to make anymore. Bold, exuberant and swashbuckling, it has the purity and simplicity of something Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn might have bounded through." |
