"Flicka" (20th Century Fox)
Same Old Same Old
“Flicka” is the same old saga of a girl and her horse we have seen a thousand times in the past. From Elizabeth Taylor to Dakota Fanning we have seen this same basic story play out over countless movies, and they always leave us with a lump in our hearts and a smile on our faces. From that standpoint they are good entertainment, but from the standpoint of seeing something new “Flicka” is not.
Alison Lohman plays Katy, a teenage girl who comes home from her private high school to her family ranch. This is where she longs to be and doesn’t care a thing about furthering her education. Her brother Jack (Danny Pino) on the other hand doesn’t care anything about the ranch and wants to go to college. Guess which one their father (Tim McGraw) wants to take over the ranch when he retires.
Anyway their father Rob (McGraw) has a herd of purebred horses which he tends. He is not interested in breaking mustangs, but Katy is. She finds a wild horse and begs her father to bring it home. He resists at first but eventually does capture the horse and bring it back to the ranch. There Katy works on taming the creature, that she has named Flicka.
Eventually there are conflicts between father and daughter over the horse; there is a horse race that Katy wants to enter; and there is a race through the wilds that ends up tragically. Eventually the father is gong to have to see that he and his daughter are very much alike, and that Katy and the horse share some traits too.
The acting in this movie is not the greatest. The best actor in the film is Maria Bello who makes Nell, the mother, a loveable and heartwarming person. Bello can also be sexy in an underplayed way and she makes the somewhat wooden Tim McGraw more lifelike when he is sharing scenes with her.
McGraw showed some true acting talent in the film “Friday Night Lights” but as the remote father in this film he is stoic to the extreme. It feels like he is never inside his character but merely playing at being the man. Danny Pino is much more into being his character than McGraw is, and Pino isn’t exactly an award-winning actor at this point. He has potential but he’s not there yet.
Alison Lohman is a good actress but it bothered me to think that at 27 she is almost as old as Bello who plays her mother. There is maybe ten or twelve years difference between the two women. She looks like a teen but knowing her true age was disconcerting.
The film is rated PG for mild profanity and some violence.
Young girls will love this movie. The rest of us will be mildly entertained. If this was the first “girl with a horse” movie made, we might be even more impressed but as it is we have all been there, done that in the past.
I scored “Flicka” a ditto 5 out of 10.
