This big-budget western bears a striking resemblance to the recent Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai, though it's more fun and less pretentious.

| Jun 29, 2022

Sharif grounds the silliness a little. When he looks across the desert with those eyes that have always hinted that hard weather is coming, everybody else rushing around the set looks overdressed for a costume party.

| Dec 18, 2017

Formulaic, overly simple, too violent for tweens.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 24, 2010

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2006

Fitfully entertaining hokum as long as it isn't taken too seriously… Remarkably, Disney doesn't whitewash the more politically incorrect elements of Hopkins' tale.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 1, 2004

The stereotypes and blatant propaganda wouldn't irritate so much if the action itself wasn't so relentlessly dreary -- a desert of imagination, parched of original ideas.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 20, 2004

An adventure that never met a cliche it couldn't saddle, mount and ride for a butt-numbing two hours and sixteen minutes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 9, 2004

Slow, plodding and arduous, though spiked with occasional hiccups of excitement.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 9, 2004

An exciting, colorful and very appealing movie.

| Mar 18, 2004

Entertaining, although it suffers from uneven pacing, one tangential and overlong plot development near the climax, and several mediocre process shots.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 16, 2004

It's a manqu of a rousing adventure tale and not the real thing. You're constantly aware of the gulf between how the movie wants to excite you and the halfhearted execution.

| Mar 16, 2004

Popcorn for us and oats for the horses, delivered by the tall drink of water that is Mortensen.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 11, 2004

A hybrid of both traditional and revisionist contradictions.

| Mar 9, 2004

... filled with cliches.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2004

One rousing, if rote, adventure.

| Mar 5, 2004

Lawrence this ain't; not by a long shot, and certainly not by a dromedary's nose hair.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2004

Limited by one-dimensional, even stereotypical characters and a predictable and drawn-out plot.

| Mar 5, 2004

Whether it's true or not has little to do with whether it works as a movie, and overall it does, thanks to Mortensen's slightly hesitant charm ... and some dazzling visual work from director of photography Shelley Johnson.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 5, 2004

It's not as if we haven't seen movies like Hidalgo before -- the cowboy, the horse, the hat -- and yet there's something fresh about it all the same.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 5, 2004

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 5, 2004