If it’s nothing else, Arthur the King is a solid introduction to adventure racing, an arduous mix of running, climbing, biking and kayaking in inhospitable climates over hundreds of miles. One race takes days. It’s not for the faint hearted.
Unlike this movie, which is pre-chewed meat for the softest of constitutions, a fictional retelling of the story of Swedish adventure racer Mikael Lindnord, his mid-race encounter with a street dog and their mutual stagger together towards some kind of salvation.
The original story took place in Ecuador, but Simon Cellan Jones’s film relocates the action to the Dominican Republic, where Mikael, now renamed Michael and played by Mark Wahlberg in another doughty-plugger performance, will race with his team in an attempt to do what he’s never managed to do in a career that should already be over – win.
But first he has to put his team together. Chik (the charismatic Ali Suliman), an injured older racer who’s a brilliant navigator and tactician. Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel, still best known for Game of Thrones, but coming soon in John Woo’s hotly anticipated remake of his own The Killer), a superb climber carrying parental emotional baggage. Leo (Simu Liu, who had the title role in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), a dude with a massive social-media following and the sort of cocksure me-focused attitude that’s the opposite of what’s required in a successful adventure-racing team.
Plus, eventually, Arthur, a scrappy, hungry and injured street dog who turns up unannounced midway in the early section of the race and then sticks to the team like glue after Michael makes the mistake of giving him a meatball.
Arthur, the underdog that this underdog team don’t need but end up with anyway, turns out to be the making of the team and of each individual, the emotional avatar helping Michael go harder, Chik forget his pain, Olivia her fears and Leo the fact that he’s a dick. I’ll say no more.
There are periodic moments of jeopardy – there’s a scene high up on a zipwire that’s particularly tense – but once the dog arrives on the scene the race becomes increasingly irrelevant and so do the personal woes of all four team members. Arthur is the ace up the film’s sleeve, the reason to watch, but he also makes the team member’s emotional travails seem increasingly irrelevant, as if a lot of setting up has been done for barely any payback.
The dog also denatures the film’s ethical dilemma, which is a standard Hollywood one – should the team do the right thing and lose or do the wrong thing and win? – but he smooths over whole chunks of terrible dialogue and unnecessary exposition, which often comes from the mouth of British adventurer Bear Grylls, who acts as a voice-only commentator on the race.
The Dominican Republic looks lush and fertile, if poor, in the rare moments when actual locals intrude. There’s a touch of the poverty tourism thing going on here – gap-year sporting larks for rich people – but that’s to read more into this film than it can bear. And there’s a long chunk of time remaining once the race is over, filled up with more doggie jeopardy, which goes on a bit.
But in the main it is what it is – a very likeable tale capably acted by the four leads (and Ukai, the dog who plays Arthur) who work wonders with a weak script. All in all it’s a bit like a session skimming through social media when important event a) and important person b) are suddenly entirely eclipsed by a post about a helpless animal being rescued from a raging river – your focus immediately shifts, even if you’re not an animal person and whatever you were looking at before is no longer relevant. Rough, as the punchline to most of the doggie jokes goes, this is not.
Arthur the King – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
