Dog good, rest of the movie...?

The good news is that the dog is pretty much better than everyone and everything in “Arthur The King”, another dog movie that goes through the same manipulative motions. All in all, I think it will be hard to find a movie this year that’s as happy to be as average as this one is, and whose real fans won’t care as long as the dog is on screen.

They can rest assured, the film is based on a true story and most of what the dog goes through actually is true. It has Wahlberg playing one of those tough mudder racers named Michael Light, who along with his team of three enters into a 54 team adventure race in the Dominican Republic which covers a whole range of extreme sports. What they only realize mid-way is that a stray dog is following them and even saves them on a couple of occasions.


And like I said, the dog is the ticket. I would have much rather spent the early portion of the film with the dog, who they christen Arthur. We see him in the early portion of the movie either hobbling around the streets of the DR or near death. Your heart goes out to him, mostly because the filmmakers make you feel like a monster otherwise. How manages to trail Michael and his group through mountains and other rocky terrain is of interest but is never explained. This dog is just a fighter though, he’s got no quit.


And neither does Michael, who presents Wahlberg another chance to wrap himself up in sanctimonious machismo. For Michael, racing isn't just a sport but some freeway to a higher power. He sees a basically unexplainable sanctity in running, even admonishing people who see it as a pathway to glory or for social media clout. Basically Michael is an insufferable pill you wouldn't want to spend a mile running with.

One of numerous things explained in this movie is how this guy has a family and job yet he's allowed to treat both with such carelessness. Why does he seem so bored with his own family, why does his wife seemingly enable him to do so, and why is running the only thing in his life that seems to give him purpose?

The film holds Michael up as a dreamer who just needs to learn to put down roots, and since we’re told this in the beginning, we know all we need to know about his story arc. The dog is supposed to help change him but the film is so low on actual moments of humanity, and Wahlberg seems clueless how to relate to the dog anyway, so the whole arc just kinda become a foregone conclusion in the end.

At least he has one. Other members of the Michael racing team are as one dimensional as it gets.
There’s Nathalie Emanuel’s climber, who’s father has pancreatic cancer and the only way the film can make that poignant is to also make it relevant to her winning this race, as if the one means anything to the other. And there’s also the map reader (Ali Suliman), who has a bum knee. And Simu Liu plays the team member who posts to social media.

Generally talk amongst the group centers around strategy and an almost slavish pursuit of winning. These people seem to have lost themselves a long time ago and now just talk in inspirational sports movie cliches and an almost slavish pursuit of letting winning be the only thing that gives their lives meaning. I didn’t care about them, I found them mostly very pathetic.

Of all the racing in the film, there’s one stunning scene of acrophobic, death-defying dread on a zipline. We have a pretty good idea of what’s gonna happen, but it’s one of the few times at least where this movie feels like it’s trying. By the end it’s all auto-pilot. Even the message of the film, which we’ve seen coming all along, is shouted and robbed of any subtlety so that even the people in the back get it. There will be two kinds of people who watch this movie- the ones who hate being pandered to, and the ones just want to see what happens to the dog.