Frank T. Hopkins was an amazing historical figure. In addition to starring in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, he palled around with no less than Teddy Roosevelt and Billy the Kid. Perhaps most remarkably, Hopkins rode his American mustang, Hidalgo, to victory against the world's finest Arabian horses in the prestigious 3,000-mile Ocean of Fire race.

Pretty exciting stuff.

Too bad none of it's true.

According to contemporary historians and scholars, Hopkins worked some of his life handling horses for Ringling Brothers and the rest of it working for the New York City subway.

That is, until the 1930s, when he made himself famous by making up stories about winning horse races.

Fast forward several decades to Hidalgo, a Disney movie that has the audacity to allege Hopkins' heroic horse-racing adventure is "based on a true story." I have no problem with filmmakers tinkering with history. What bothers me about Hidalgo, though, is that the filmmakers overlooked the far more interesting story -- i.e., what would possess a presumably sane subway worker to try and convince people he was a world-class horse-racer -- in favor of the same old boring underdog formula Disney's already given us somewhere upward of a hundred thousand times.

The part of the half-white, half-Native American Hopkins is played by Lord of the Rings' own Viggo Mortensen, whose portrayal ranges from soft-spoken ruggedness to softer-spoken ruggedness. He doesn't seem to have anything else in his emotional playbook. I often couldn't tell if he was speaking or merely exhaling.

The Ocean of Fire is supposed to be an endurance race, but we don't see much enduring onscreen -- just a handful of shots showing Hopkins falling off his horse a few times and looking thirsty. For a trek that was supposed to have taken more than 60 days, we need something more than this. If this movie is really about will power and endurance, then we really need to see Hopkins' daily physical and psychological struggle.

Instead, it's the audience that is forced to endure -- specifically, a gallery of side characters that comprise a veritable Who's Who of idiots. They generate a complicated kidnapping side plot, which occupies screen time that ought to have been dedicated to the actual race. As the film progresses, we discover that these characters have established a tangled network of weird allegiances to one another, which I neither understood nor cared about.

One thing I did understand was the shameless way Hidalgo exploits the United States' current Arab-phobic climate. The filmmakers are meticulous in making sure they portray every male Arab character as superstitious, deceitful, lecherous, cowardly or all of the above. The only way any of them achieve even a small amount of dignity is by Hopkins' virtuous Western influence.

The sole Arab woman, the curiously named Jazira (remind you of anything?), is the most obvious of the film's thinly disguised propagandistic representations. With Hopkins' subtle coaxing, she is all-too-eager to remove her burka when the opportunity arises.

Disney's fantasy here is that once the Islamic woman sees firsthand an emissary of the Western world, she will shed her cultural heritage as automatically as if it were a piece of lint on her clothing. Recent real-life events have demonstrated this isn't always the case.

In fact, the only lesson I gleaned from Hidalgo is that I would gladly traverse the perilous Ocean of Fire to get out of seeing another uplifting underdog picture.