Arthur The King Review: A Good Enough Movie About A Very Good Dog

The old show business adage is that one should never work with animals or children. This is not because working with animals or children is difficult, but because if you work with animals or children, you will never be the star. Such is certainly the case in the new movie Arthur the King. It includes major movie stars like Mark Wahlberg and Simu Liu, whom their four-legged co-star utterly overshadow.

Based on the book Arthur - The Dog Who Crossed The Jungle To Find A Home by Swedish racer Mikael Lindnord, Arthur the King tells an Americanized version of a true story about a racing team that adopted a dog on their multi-day journey through grueling terrain. 

Michael Light (Wahlberg) is, according to the voice of the sports announcer we hear at the beginning, the best adventure racer to never win a world championship. Adventure racing is a team sport where three men and one woman work together on a multi-day course across hundreds of miles on foot, on bikes, and in kayaks. Despite Light’s reported abilities, the first we see of him, he’s leading his team into disaster, as his ego prevents him from reversing a bad decision until it’s too late, leading to an embarrassing loss.

Three years later, after trying his hand at a real job for a while, Light decides to give the Adventure Racing World Championship another ago. He builds a ragtag team of Chik (Ali Suliman), who is well past his prime, Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel) the daughter of a well-known climber, but who has no particular desire to compete herself, and Leo (Liu) one of Light’s former team members who hasn’t spoken to him since the loss.

The team gains a fifth member, however, when Michael feeds a stray dog at one of the race checkpoints, resulting in the dog following and ultimately joining them on their race through the Dominican Republic.

Arthur The King’s first act struggles as the audience waits for man and dog to find each other. 

With a runtime barely over 90 minutes long, Arthur the King moves at a breakneck pace to get its story in, and that’s especially true at the outset. We go from Wahlberg’s character losing a race, to trying a life without racing, to building a new team, to training with that team, and then starting the race all before you’ve had a chance to eat a few handfuls of popcorn. Interspersed with all that are a few scenes of the dog that will eventually meet the human characters as it deals with its own struggles living as a stray on the street of the Dominican Republic.

The result of so much happening so fast is that we never get a chance to really get to know the human characters who are the ones the movie is ultimately supposed to be about. We know that Liu’s character is a social media star, that Suliman’s character is the old man with the bad knee, and Emmanual’s character is, well, the woman, and that's about it. The dog and people don't truly get together until well past the middle of the film, so until then the humans are all we have.

There’s no scene where the characters get to know and understand each other, so the audience never gets to understand them either. The movie is trying to get to the bit where the dog and the humans cross paths as quickly as possible and clearly sees this backstory as necessary to set everything up but unimportant.

Mark Wahlberg, Simu Liu, carry the story on sheer charisma. 

The lack of any serious characterization is a problem because, despite the name of the film, the humans and the race they are in are what the movie tells us it's about. But because the characters have no depth, they also have no arcs. It opens with Mark Wahlberg's character losing because he's unwilling to listen to his team, and so you expect a scene later where he overcomes this flaw, leading to some growth, but that scene never comes.

Luckily, the stars of Arthur the King are pretty charismatic actors, so they’re able to carry the load of the weak story. Wahlberg, Liu, Emmanual, and Suliman have some natural chemistry that makes the fact that the movie didn't bother to establish any chemistry between them work well enough, even if it doesn't work well.

Once man and dog find each other, things pick up a bit. Arthur is a dog that has clearly lived his life on the streets and has the injuries to show for it. He's not in great shape, but the idea that Michael Light may feel a connection to the dog because they're both a bit of a mess is more than clear. Any dog person is instantly going to lose their heart to the pup, which is, of course, the whole point of the movie. 

In the end, the emotional story of Arthur the King wins out.

Still, even then Arthur simply becomes part of the ensemble. The dog becomes a social media star as word travels that the team has picked up a fifth member. 

The race and the dog come into conflict, which is when, despite the issues Arthur the King has had up to this point, the emotions do start to take over. The true drama of Arthur the King is what's going to happen to Arthur, and you'd have to have a heart of stone (or just really hate dogs) to not be invested in the four-legged friend.

Despite some significant flaws, Arthur the King succeeds at its primary goal of being an emotional story about a man and a dog. It's not the best movie of its kind, but for those looking for exactly this sort of heartwarming story, it is exactly the film it appears to be and not much more.