Watched, of course, primarily for the presence of Miranda Cosgrove, though that hasn’t always been cause enough alone for me to watch a movie (I still haven’t seen Keeping Up with the Steins and it’s been languishing in my collection for years, lol). This one, however, I pretty much knew I would enjoy as it’s a “girl and horse” movie which I’ve covered here before. It looked to me initially like a tame noughties Wild Horse Hank and that’s a close enough comparison: young girls save the horses from the bad man and “learn things”.

It lacks the wonderful soundtrack and smokey Seventies cinematography but this is a perfectly simple watch if you like this genre as much as I do. It’s pretty much the definition of a 3-heart movie around here: absolutely nothing unique or indispensable, just about everybody concerned (including supporting players like Robert Wagner, Fred Ward and Paul Sorvino) have done better work, and there are better movies to watch first even within the tiny sub-genre … but if it’s your kind of movie, it passes, and Miranda is simply wonderful.

The adventures of a girl and her horse? Initiate biased mode

“ … when we’re riding, all I feel is free …”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this production (outside of the bizarre boycotting story concerning apparent animal cruelty on the set? I’ll just leave that one alone …) is that 3 years after her scarily convincing performance as a teenager in Matchstick Men, Alison Lohman was still playing 10 years younger than her actual age, and again rather convincingly, lol.

That quote above pretty much sums it up for me, though. When they’re riding – whether she’s on the horse or it’s just Spirit style aerial shots of wild mustangs galloping across the plains to the main theme music – this movie cannot fail to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. It absolutely has the gorgeous moments I want from such a movie. Outside of those moments … not so much. The score definitely owes something to Hans Zimmer’s work on Spirit (to be fair I think it would be hard for any composer to write anything different to horses running after seeing that movie) but outside of the main theme it’s pretty simple melodramatic stuff, as is the story.

Lohman is great – though I’d certainly prefer to see a younger, more age appropriate newcomer given a chance, if they really needed the extra hours on the set then Lohman is probably the best choice there is, and she’s the best thing in the movie. For her and the horses it’s nearly worth watching. And you can’t really argue with a movie whose end credits consist of a sickeningly sweet barrage of pictures of (presumably) real little girls and their horses accompanied to the cheesy but irresistible Tim McGraw song “My Little Girl”, lol. But for all other purposes, I absolutely recommend Spirit. Even if you’ve already seen that movie … see it a fifteenth time, lol, you know you want to It’s that or International Velvet. Or Dreamer. Okay there are lots of them, make a day of it hehe.

Edit: I just realised I forgot to even mention that the movie is directed by none other than Michael Mayer, who made one of my (and I think nobody else’s lol) all-time faves A Home at the End of the World. It was one of the first things I noticed in the credits that really got me more excited than just over the girl-horse thing. I guess that I forgot to even mention it speaks volumes of what a disappointment it ultimately was. While I’m adding to the review, I’ve also gotta say – gorgeous poster … I really I hope I can find a copy of it sometime.