Everyone can relate to the idea of redemption.  I don’t mean in a religious sense, but getting another chance to succeed after failing the last time around.  Personally, if I thought about it for ten minutes, I would come up with a number of moments in my life that I wish I could do over.  But life usually doesn’t give us second chances, except when the failure involves sports.  In that case, you may get another chance simply because there’s always another season or, as is with Arthur the King, another race.

Such is the story of Michael Light (Mark Wahlberg), an adventure racing athlete and his need to redeem himself.  Like most sports movies, Arthur the King is about an athlete who gives himself one last shot at glory.  However, or more importantly, the movie is about a dog he meets on his journey that changes him in profound ways.  Before I get into how Arthur fits into Michael’s story, let me briefly explain what adventure racing is about.  In a nutshell, it’s like a decathlon that takes place in a jungle.  Over the span of several days, teams of four will run, climb, cycle and paddle their way over 435 miles towards the finish line.  Given the setting of the race, the participants are constantly exposed to the elements:  rain, mud, heat, water, cliffs and so on.  Unlike a decathlon, you may need to run in a rainstorm in the middle of the night.  Or risk of falling off a cliff when you’re looking for a shortcut.  Or compete with little to no sleep for days at a time.  Being an adventure racer requires athletic ability, endurance and a high tolerance for pain.  If you can have all those, you stand a fair chance of winning.  Or you may flame out spectacularly due to your own arrogance, as Michael did in his last race.

Three years ago, Michael stubbornly ignored the advice of his teammate Leo (Simu Liu) and their team were forced to pull out on the first day.  To commemorate the team’s epic failure that resulted from Michael’s poor leadership, Leo posts a picture of Michael’s scowling face on Instagram.  Three years later, Michael is still stewing over the outcome of his last race and that photo.  His patient wife Helen (Juliet Rylance) tries to get him to leave the past behind, but he can’t let it go.  He’s so fixated on his last race that he always burns the steaks.  On the plus side, Michael appears to be a good husband and father, so perhaps that’s why Helen has put up with his mopiness for so many years.  After giving up racing, Michael has been earning a living by helping his realtor father Charlie (Paul Guilfoyle).  Michael isn’t interested in showing houses, but he has no other options.  Promotional opportunities are reserved for winners, and Michael never finished first after years of competing.

After a day spent sulking in the home he’s supposed to be showing, Charlie has a heart-to-heart with his son.  He either needs to commit to the job or find something else to do.  This shakes Michael out of his funk and he decides to race one more time.  For his team, Michael recruits three misfits like himself, each with personal issues to overcome.  Chik (Ali Suliman) is an excellent cyclist but has a bad knee.  Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is an expert climber but she stopped competing because she didn’t want to live in her father’s shadow.  Leo is the most athletic of the bunch, but he’s impatient and a narcissist.  Their team leader, Michael, has never proven himself in that regard.  If you’ve guessed that each of the questions surrounding the team will be answered by the end of the big race, you’d be right.  However, as the title indicates, this story is really about a dog named Arthur and the outsized role he plays in it.

Arthur is far from the typically handsome movie dog.  He’s a mangy mutt who raids garbage cans for food.  He also has a lame leg and a bleeding wound from a fight with other dogs or humans.  Arthur’s a scrappy survivor, though, and he seems to recognize himself in Michael.  The two have a touching meet-cute, when Michael first notices Arthur staring at him at a checkpoint.  Michael approaches Arthur, who regards him casually.  Michael gives Arthur some meatballs and says goodbye, clearly touched by their chance meeting.  Michael and the team head out and proceed to cross all sorts of rugged terrain, only to run into Arthur again more than a hundred miles later.  How did he, a wounded, gimpy dog, manage to keep up with them?  Clearly, Arthur has decided that Michael is worth following, and from that point on he’s an unofficial member of the team.  He’s not just a mascot, though, as he prevents Leo from making a fateful decision.  Arthur accompanies Michael until the last leg of the race, when Michael is forced to leave him behind.  Arthur, however, tries to follow Michael and puts his own life in danger.  The urgency of the situation requires Michael to make a life-defining choice: continue on to certain victory, or turn back and save Arthur.  I won’t spoil things by telling you what Michael decides to do, but I will say that through it all, Arthur teaches Michael that being a great leader isn’t about winning, it’s about putting your teammates first.

If Arthur the King had just been about adventure racer Michael Light and his redemption arc, it still would have been a decent sports movie.  The cast, led by Mark Wahaberg and Simu Liu, are all likable in roles that require them to be endurance athletes first and fully-realized characters second.  Director Simon Cellan Jones expertly captures the punishing and exhilarating aspects of the race, as well as the extraordinarily beautiful Dominican Republic setting.  As with most sports movies, this one gives us a team of underdogs to root for as they overcome all sorts of mental and physical obstacles.  (Regarding the latter, there’s one that takes place on a zip line that’s a doozy.)  What elevates Arthur the King above its very formulaic plot is that it is also about the impact a stray dog named Arthur has on Michael.  Like Seabiscuit, it’s a sports movie combined with the animal as a therapist movie.  In all honesty, Arthur the King is not in the same league as Seabiscuit, which was nominated for Best Picture.  However, I was moved while watching Arthur befriend Michael and then help him become not only a better leader, but a better person.  While the scenes of the competition itself are sufficiently thrilling, it’s the moments where Arthur and Michael bond that had the biggest effect on me.  As someone who has given a forever home to many pets over the years, I appreciated how sincerely this movie represented the special bond between people and the animals.  We may think we choose them to be our companions, but as this movie shows, it’s really the other way around.  Arthur the King is a wholesome, sincere and entertaining movie throughout.  Recommended.

Analysis

Arthur the King is the thirteenth film I’ve seen with Mark Whalberg in the cast.  He’s been in 54 movies to date, which is incredible when you remember that he started out as a rapper and has never had any professional training as an actor.  If I were to put a finger on why he’s had such a prolific career, it would be a) his rugged handsomeness, b) his ability to portray working-class people, and c) his no-frills approach to acting.  Whalberg clearly knows what his range is and rarely steps outside of it.  While he can be funny, as evidenced by Ted,  The Other Guys and Daddy’s Home, he knows that playing honest, hard-working, relatable guys is his wheelhouse.  Accordingly, Whalberg was perfectly cast as Micky Ward in The Boxer, which coincidentally has been his only Academy Award nominated performance.  The movie provided him with the rare opportunity to portray a pugnacious and sensitive man who is torn between his love for his drug-abusing brother and his own destiny.

In his non-comedic movies since then, Whalberg has done particularly well in roles that leverage his ability to convey calmness under intense pressure.  In his two movies with director Peter Berg, Deepwater Horizon and Patriot’s Day, Whalberg is the center of the action as chaos swirls around him.  In Lone Survivor, he manages to survive after the rest of his troop is killed in Afghanistan.  In these three roles, he perfectly epitomizes the beleaguered American everyman, staunchly committed to his morals and values until he either solves the problem at hand or dies trying.

Whalberg has been a devout Catholic since before his acting career began, but his faith seems to have influenced the roles he’s taken over the last several years.  Where once acted in movies with language, violence and drug use, his recent films have been overwhelmingly family friendly.  This is the reason why I haven’t seen any of his movies since 2017’s All the Money in the World.  The films he’s made since then remind me of the movies that Disney once made, films that parents can feel comfortable watching with their entire family.  (Father Stu may be the one exception, but Whalberg ultimately hedged and released an alternate version without the swearing.)

To be clear, I don’t mind seeing films that strive to be wholesome.  However, most of Whalberg’s recent films didn’t appeal to me because I thought they were too tame compared to what he’s done in the past.  I was open to seeing Arthur the King because I had never heard of adventure racing before and I liked how the story focused on the relationship between the dog and Whalberg’s character.  Honestly, Whalberg doesn’t add anything to his portrayal of Michael Light, beyond what the role requires.  He’s present in the role, but his take on the character is straight down the middle.  I still liked Whalberg’s performance, because his natural intensity still comes through even when he’s not trying.  I probably shouldn’t criticize his performance too harshly, because the other characters are thin.  For example, the movie tells us that Leo is a huge Instagram user and Olivia googled the Dominican Republic for interesting trivia.  Comparatively speaking, Michael’s tendency to burn steaks is the one thing about him I remembered.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that Whalberg can do more than what he does in this movie.  If he wants his faith to be reflected in his career, that’s his choice.  The problem I have with this approach is that it can become an excuse to stop challenging himself and his audience.  He’s still the same actor who appeared in The Boxer, The Departed and The Other Guys, to name a couple of his performances where he stretched as an actor.  Family-friendly films get a bad rap for being safe.  Although Whalberg can get by on his personality, he should be challenging himself more than he does in this movie.  The movie may be named after Arthur, but that doesn’t mean he should be the only one giving an interesting performance in it.