Usually when you watch a sports movie, you learn something about the sport. When you watch biographies, you learn something about the person.

Neither of these is true with "Secretariat."

Secretariat is not a "sports" movie about horse racing, nor a bio-pic about a horse.

It follows an unlikable woman, with a little horse-stuff thrown in.

There is a lot of bad acting and a lot of ridiculous scenes that amount to nothing (except a colossal waste of 115 minutes) and, after it's all said and done, you realize that the movie could have done with a few more script re-writes and a completely new director...plus it was at least 15 minutes too long.

You can see that the people involved didn't care about historical accuracy nor about horse racing. Or even horses for that matter. It's just a bunch of "peaks and valleys" shoved on top of each other.

This is the movie:
"Your Mama died." Boo hoo
"But she left you $20,000,000" YAY!
"But you owe a bunch of taxes" boo hoo
"But you have a great horse" YAY!
"But he can't lose or you lose all your money" Boohoo
"Your Daddy loves you" YAY!
"Your Daddy Died." Boo hoo
etc
etc
etc


Peaks and valleys non stop for 115 minutes, and the whole time you don't care a damn about the characters (Dianne Lane's character is SO unlikable you want to slap her the whole time).

Skip it.

 

Let me also add that the "big race" scene that you wait the entire movie for has 2 tracks overlaying the image of the horse running:

- Gospel music (!)
- Dianne Lane reading from the book of Job (!)

I mean what were they thinking?

 

A friend saw it, all of the above seems to be true, worth a miss!