Arthur the King

Mark Wahlberg stars in a movie that's both a shaggy dog tale and overcoming-all-odds sports odyssey -- an odd cross-breed of a flick that just works.

I’ll be the first to admit that when presented with a movie about people who go off and do dangerous things like climb mountains, swim huge distances or brave snake-infested jungles, my reaction is not admiration or curiosity but a head-shaking, “Why?!?”

I can at least grasp those who brave bodily injury or death for fame and fortune, but what about things like “adventure racing” — incredibly dangerous cross-country treks where teams cover hundreds of miles in just a few days? A pro-am sport with such a small audience that not only do participants not win big prizes, they largely self-fund these crazy expeditions?

Doing stupid things for no reason just isn’t interesting or compelling to me.

So “Arthur the King” presents an intriguing challenge. It stars Mark Wahlberg as Michael Light, an over-the-hill adventure racer whose two-decade career was defined by always coming up short. Out of the game for three years, he’s determined to give it one more go and rounds up a team including a grizzled veteran, a showboating hotshot and an untested youngster. They must contest with underwhelmed sponsors, disdain from their competitors and internal strife amongst themselves.

Pretty standard inspiring overcoming-all-odds sports movie stuff, right?

The twist is that in the midst of their journey through the harshest terrain of the Dominican Republic, Michael encounters a scuzzy, wounded dog. Such strays are common in these parts, but Michael feels some kind of kindred connection and feeds it meatballs. They’re astonished when the mutt turns up 200 miles later, after they’ve traversed rivers, canyons via zipline and other daunting obstacles.

Eventually, the dog — whom Michael gives the titular name — joins them on their trek and proves an invaluable companion, even saving their lives at one point. Arthur becomes not just their mascot, but the fifth member of the team. And he starts to gain his own following on social media.

So we’ve got a sports movie married to a shaggy dog tale. It makes for an odd cross-breed of a movie… but it just works.

Wahlberg has aged well into these kinds of roles: dads/husbands who are pretty stable and normal on the outside, but still have some youthful rebellion and badassery inside. Michael is devoted to his wife, Helena (Juliet Rylance), and their young daughter, but isn’t inspired by his job with his dad’s real estate agency. He yearns to be back out there on the trail, chasing that elusive championship that’s been denied to him time and again.

It’s a based-on-true story, though the real guy is Swedish. Michael Brandt wrote the screenplay adaptation from his book and director Simon Cellan Jones worked with Wahlberg on last year’s “The Family Plan.” It’s a breezy, lean movie at 90 minutes that knows how to hit its emotional beats and move on to the next thing.

More or less the first half is concerned with Michael putting together his team and trying to forge them into a collective unit, and then the back half becomes more about his relationship with Arthur — two kicked-around mutts who have a lot more heart than anyone gives them credit.

Simu Liu plays Liam, a younger competitor who was on Michael’s last team, which flamed out spectacularly. He’s since become a social influencer icon, more concerned with promoting his new clothing line than actually hoofing it in the wild. Michael is more or less forced to include him on the team because of Liam’s celebrity, setting up an alpha male showdown between the two.

Ali Suliman is Chik, another veteran who’s even older than Michael. He got dropped by his last team because of his bum knee, but he’s also a sorcerer at picking out the right routes through the terrain. An interesting aspect of adventure racing is there’s no set course, and each team can take any way they want to reach the next checkpoint.

Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel) is the youngest and a newbie to the sport, the daughter of a legendary retired competitor and an ace mountain climber. She’s got a lot of daddy issues that will be explored later on, and joins the race reluctantly at his behest.

There are some amazing scenes during the race, including them tearing down a mountain road on bicycles or glopping through hazardous swamps. The high point is a reckless zipline shortcut over the canopy of forest — while hanging onto their bikes. Major heebie-jeebies for acrophobics like me.

Arthur doesn’t really even have much of a presence during the first part of the movie, but gradually becomes its central character. We see him being shunned by humans and chased by other dogs — an outcast among outcasts. At first he’s hesitant to even accept food from Michael. There’s also the issue of how exactly a wounded dog manages to track this particular group of humans all that way — something the movie leaves a mystery.

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to get immersed in the pooch’s fate as the race goes on, and what comes after. Yes, it’s pretty predictable and not a little sappy. But this is the sort of movie that’s an affirmation of the human — and canine — spirit. Thy tears shall be jerked.