Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Arthur the King’ on VOD, a Sports Drama That Stages an Epic Scruff-Off Between Mark Wahlberg and a Very Cute Dog

On the surface, Arthur the King (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is a BOATS (Based On A True Story) about an adventure racer and his dog. But subtextually? It’s a world-class scruff-off between Mark Wahlberg and a heart-melting mutt. Wahlberg plays a somewhat fictionalized version of athlete Mikael Lindnord, whose adventure racing squad was joined by a bedraggled stray pooch in the midst of a typically grueling multi-leg pain-is-your-friend competition. Lindnord’s experience inspired him to write a book which inspired a movie which hopefully inspires us all to Embrace Life And All The Selfless Loving Sad-Eyed Fluffballs We Meet. Or maybe it won’t. The movie, I mean. Dogs always deserve the best we can give them, and they’re always inspiring, especially if they’re cute, but even more especially if they’re ugly, but that doesn’t mean all movies featuring dogs are the best. Now let’s determine if this particular dog movie is good or just, you know, a dog.

ARTHUR THE KING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: If you want to learn about the ins and outs of adventure racing, go read Wikipedia, cuz you’re not getting it here. The movie gives us the bare basics – adventure racing teams consist of four or so people who run and bike and hike and paddle and climb and zipline and do whatever it takes to get from start to finish during a five-day endurance test. It’s kind of an -athlon, but seems to be more grueling than any other -athlon. From the looks of things I’d call it a murderathlon, and you almost certainly have to be a maniac to do it. Michael Light (Wahlberg) does it, and we meet him in the middle of a race and THIS BETTER NOT BE A MOVIE WHERE THE DOG DIES AT THE END. The thought occurred to me very early on, well before Michael even meets the dog. We meet Michael as he leads his crew to spectacular failure, so he gives up the adventure-racing life to work for his father’s real estate company and even though he has a supportive wife and an adorable daughter and what looks like a million-dollar house in Colorado with a spectacular mountain view, he’s not happy. A dog would probably help with that, especially if the dog LIVES TO SEE THE END CREDITS. You hear us, movie? Don’t DO this to us. Please. 

Three years after Michael’s final crash-and-burn was documented on Instagram by teammate Leo (Sim Liu) for the world to ridicule, he decides to piece together another team for a race set in the Dominican Republic. Between scenes in which Michael recruits badass rock climber Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel), rouses old pal with a bad knee Chik (Ali Suliman) and sort of buries the hatchet with Leo, we get scenes of a mangy Benji-ish woofer scrounging and surviving on the streets of Santo Domingo. This dog. Good grief. He looks like a dust mop mated with Santa’s Little Helper. Devastating animal, positively devastating. Michael delivers a rousing, more than slightly angry speech to a boardroom full of potential sponsors trying to scrape up money for the race, and Poor Sad Pathetic But Spirited Nameless Dog scrapes up something to eat out of a garbage can. Dog and man couldn’t be farther apart – or closer together in their feelings of desperation. This is that thing called irony. 

After being dots following a dotted line on a map for a while, Michael and Team Broadrail are in 17th place. They stop for a rest and as Michael rips open a package of freeze-dried meatballs, he notices this amazing, shabby creature sad-eyeing him. He’s bleeding, the pup. Michael gives him a meatball and we’re all like NO YOU NEED THE PROTEIN BRO but as these things always go, now the dog is ready to jump in front of a herd of wayward zeppelins to save him. The team sets off and the dog watches them go and after they take a shortcut and blow by a sign that reads PELIGRO and subsequently have some harrowing adventures, they stop to chill in the jungle and – well, there’s the dog. How the hell did he get there? Chik jokes that he has wings. They name him Arthur, and Arthur is their inspiration. If he got over and around and through this insane terrain, with an ugly oozing wound and a bad leg, then they surely can, right? Hell, they might even win this thing, because teams without dogs are obviously inferior than those with. And that’s a fact.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Arthur the King is like Channing Tatum vehicle Dog meets Marley and Me meets Strays meets any number of semi-generic sports movies meets any number of semi-generic Mark Wahlberg BOATS movies (see: Father Stu, Joe Bell, Patriots Day, Deepwater Horizon and/or Lone Survivor, in which he plays essentially the same type of earnest-guy character). 

Performance Worth Watching: Arthur is played by a pup named Ukai, who wins this accolade because, as always, dogs > humans. 

Memorable Dialogue: Michael’s angry pitch to potential sponsors: “I learned that I could embrace pain. BUCKETS of it. I learned that suffering is a skill, and I could suffer more than anyone else.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I’m happy to report that Arthur the King is not buckets of pain. Sure, it indulges ajll the cliches of sports movies and sad-animal movies and Mark Wahlberg BOATS movies, and it’s sometimes sullied by awful dialogue, and it shamelessly jerks us around and piles on until you want to yell STOP MANIPULATING MY FRAGILE EMOTIONS at the screen, but hey, nobody’s perfect. This is a totally acceptable movie that didn’t “inspire” me as much as it probably wanted to, but it made me feel warm and good about things. Life is pain, but life is also a wonder, and you sense the wonder when you look into the eyes of an intensely unconditional-loving creature, and those eyes belong to my cat. Or my other cat. Or the dog in this movie. Or maybe Baby Yoda. You’re not going to find that feeling just anywhere, you know.

And director Simon Cellan Jones knows that. All too well, it seems. When the movie doesn’t quite seem to be fleshing out its characters or piecing together elements of disparate genres, it cuts to the dog’s hungry-adorbs hang-dog look, which distracts our brains by flooding them with buckets of emotional gloosh. Wahlberg holds the movie together with the persona we’re thoroughly familiar with by now – tough on the outside, mooshy on the inside, quick with the line deliveries, ever and always almost convincingly sincere – albeit with facial hair that’s meticulously designed to mirror Arthur’s damp mange. There’s a bit where Michael looks at the pooch and wonders aloud, “Whaddaya think he went through before he met us?” Good question, but because he’ll never really know, what truly matters is, what’s going to happen to him now? NO SPOILERS of course, but it better not be a trip to the pet cemetery. One Old Yeller is enough for this world, thank you.

Our Call: You could do worse than Arthur the King, which offers approximately zero surprises, but enough cute-dog shenanigans to make it worthy of family movie night. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.