听 User Rating 
Lightweight fantasy about the true theft of racehorse Shergar from Irish stables in the 1980s, the impact of this horse on the public and what might have happened to him. A strong cast fights banal dialogue and an over-simple plot to fashion a Sunday afternoon television type of drama.
After the theft - a good set piece action sequence - the film uses up all that we really know about the story and sets off into its fantasy. It suggests that Shergar was hidden on a farm until the thieves were denied the ransom they wanted and decided to kill him. Learning what they plan, farmboy Kevin (Walsh) who is conveniently obsessed with horses, steals Shergar himself and heads for the hills.
Oddly, he doesn't make much of an effort to return Shergar. Instead, he leaves farmer David Warner to face the thieves and joins up with Ian Holm as a gypsy who is conveniently knowledgeable about horses and is travelling the country with his daughter who is conveniently the inevitable automatic love interest for Kevin.
Unfortunately everything is convenient and inevitable: though it leaps off into fiction as it must, it's a lacklustre story rather than the flight of imagination that it perhaps could have been. It's predictable, the dialogue keeps finding new depths of obviousness and the familiarity of everything reduces the characters to ciphers.
The real thieves will go to see this movie and presumably experience some great tension for the opening moments but the rest of us will just find it functional. And those of us who suspect Shergar ended up in tins will find the melodramatic ending hard to swallow.
