Eric Roberts, Louis Gossett Jr., Michael Madsen, Steve Guttenberg, all in one movie? That should set off a few alarm bells!
The movie as it turned out is also quite a bad one. It has a TV like quality to it but what is worse is that it handles its story and drama extremely poorly.
Instead of a movie that's focusing on a young girl trying to cope with the loss of her father and who's trying to bond with the mother, that she never knew she had, the movie decides to focus on horse racing. Yep, forget about any of the drama and emotions, this movie seems to believe that horse racing is far more important- and interesting to watch instead. It's quite ludicrous how this movie slowly starts to shift and stops being one about real life emotions and issues. Not that the movie was great before that but I at least still was interested in seeing where it would be taking its story to and how its characters would continue to grow and develop.
What's all the more ridicules about the movie its concept is that we, as the viewers, are supposed to believe that this girl, who doesn't like horses at all, suddenly starts to have a very strong bond and connection with one particular horse and not only that, she turns out to be an amazing horse racer as well. This movie its second half more feels like a girly fantasy tale, instead of an effective, 'real life', drama, as this movie was originally clearly intended to be. It besides doesn't ever play out in an original and surprising enough way. The movie is an extremely predictable one, from start to finish, in which everything is very black & white. It even has a ridiculously evil James Bond-type of villain in it, played by Eric Roberts.
There is never a good buildup to anything. Not to the drama, not to the romance, not to any of the characters. This is probably also due to the fact that the movie is trying to do a bit too much at times. It has far too many needless distractions in its story and far too many characters as well. The amount of characters actually makes this movie a quite confusing one to watch at times, also since the movie doesn't give all of them enough back-story, so you never know what they are all about and why they are supposedly important for the story.
And in case you are wondering whatever happened to Dean Cundey, the man who was the director of photography on a lot of classic Spielberg, Zemeckis and Carpenter movies in the past, well, he's mostly doing movies such as this nowadays. Such a waste and weird to see how some amazing and promising careers just fizzle out. Not that I'm a big Cundey fan but he deserves to work on better movies than this! It's like letting da Vinci do a Bob Ross type of painting.
I just can't see how anyone could ever enjoy- and be taken by a movie such as this one.
3/10
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