Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I’m just going to level with you right out of the gate: if you love dogs and you like movies about dogs, regardless of the countless number of them already made, then you are going to love Arthur the King. That’s really all you need to know.

Well, except perhaps that the titular dog does not factor much into the story here, until maybe a third of the way in. That said, this is actually one of several elements that made Arthur the King a better moviegoing experience than I was necessarily expecting—full disclosure, this isn’t usually my kind of movie, but I agreed to see it with a friend precisely because I knew how much she loves dogs. As long as the reviews did not indicate it was terrible, I would go. In the end the reviews are decidedly mixed, and yet I would argue the movie is better than that might seen to suggest.

Based on a true story, this is the tale of a stray dog who bonds with Michael (Mark Wahlberg), well into his final stint captaining an adventure racing team through The Dominican Republic in 2018. The man Michael is based on is Swedish athlete Mikael Lindnord, but for the purposes of this film they made the protagonist an American. I guess Wahlberg isn’t exactly known for his accent work. Still, they pretty effectively diversified the rest of Michael’s four-person racing team: Simu Liu as Leo, an Instagram-star athlete who posted a viral photo of his and Michael’s failure at the 2015 race; Palestinian actor Ali Suliman as Chik, the team navigator who actually does speak with an accent; and Nathalie Emmanuel as Olivia, an expert climber. In addition to this team, and sporadic appearances by other team competitors, the narrative occasionally cuts back to Juliet Rylance as Helen, Michael’s wife back home in Colorado, showing their little girl his racing progress online.

Maybe just slightly less often, the narrative cuts back to the dog who will be later named Arthur, struggling as a stray on the streets of Santo Domingo. Michael and his team are resting at one of the race’s transfer points when Michael notices the dog, sitting quietly a few feet away. Michael feeds him one of the meatballs from a meal pack, and they move on. The story of the race moves on as well, and the dog catches up with them again 3 days and 200 miles later. From then on, Arthur the King becomes the movie about an adventure racing team and the dog who basically invited himself to become their fifth member.

Naturally we wonder how much of what happened in this movie actually happened in real life, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Only occasionally do director Simon Cellan Jones and adapting writer Michael Brandt (based on Mikael Lindnord’s book, Arthur - The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home) into obvious Hollywood-movie territory, amping up the herorics or the plight of that dog we can’t help but root for.

But here’s where Arthur the King actually won me over: the production values are much higher than we usually get with a movie like this. There’s a great sequence, before Arthur even becomes a significant part of the narrative, with the team crossing a ravine on a zipline with bikes hung off their backs, and one of them gets stuck in the middle. The sequence is exceptionally well shot, offering just the right amount of suspense, and is a big part of giving us reason to be invested in all the human characters as opposed to just the dog. Wahlberg, for his part, gives a pretty basic, serviceable performance, and the actors around him—including the dog—help elevate how they play as a group.

It would seem that “adventure racing” involves many different types of racing activity, from hiking to cycling to kayaking, and between how well the diverse terrain they’re crossing is shot, and how well the parallel narratives of the racers and the dog are edited, until their stories become one, Arthur the King actually works out to a pretty solid entertainment.

*You’ll be on the edge of your seat, you’ll cry, you’ll be emotionally manipulated and you’ll love it.*

Overall: B+