Arthur the King, with actor Mark Wahlberg and a mangy dog named Arthur leading an extreme-sports team across 400 miles of jungle, is the best movie I’ve seen in years. Graded on the curve of how greatly it exceeds the schlock Hollywood has extruded this decade, it ranks among history’s most exceptional films.
I mean this superlative in the sense that whereas a pool of clear, fresh water in the Adirondacks is lovely, a same-sized pool of clear, fresh water in the Sahara can be the most glorious godsend in a traveler’s whole life. With exceedingly rare oases, recent Hollywood has been a storytelling desert. One genre is of the uber-jaded variety, in which bad guys are protagonists because their “virtue” is being more ruthless than the other bad guys, in a world where nobody is even decent. Genre two is that cliched superhero flick in which there’s no rhyme or reason as to when or why the superheroes recover from deathly injuries and no reason to care because they have no humanizing weaknesses. Everything is ostentatious special effects, devoid of context or any character beyond the cartoonish.
Genre three is the meander-fest: The story that isn’t really a story at all because it has no clear beginning and certainly no end, in which the whole hackneyed point seems to be that the story is the journey itself, but with the difference that the journey itself doesn’t even mean anything but instead is just pointlessly random. And genre four is the “art house” film so impressed with its ever-more-bizarre mix of the Dadaist, the surrealist, and the abstract expressionist that it forgets almost all notions of narrative or theme, much less that movies are supposed to, yes, entertain.
Arthur the King, though, makes none of these mistakes. Instead, it features good, old-fashioned storytelling with enough of a backstory and just enough introduction of characters, a straightforward plot, some real excitement, relatable emotions, ethical dilemmas, an honest-to-goodness climax, and even what has become the rarest of Hollywood features, an actual denouement. It adheres closely enough to a true story to carry significant emotional resonance, but it is fictionalized enough for dramatic purposes so as amply to fulfill a movie’s entertainment mission.
The main storyline is simple: Wahlberg plays Michael Light (based on a real-life Swede named Mikael Lindnord), an “adventure racer” with plenty of impressively good results to his name but no big victories. He wants to ditch his day job for one more shot at glory, this time leading a four-person team in brutal conditions in the Dominican Republic (Lindnord’s real race was in Ecuador). But one teammate he recruits has a bad knee, another may have gotten soft by focusing on social media stardom, and another carries the burden of a major family challenge.
At an early-race checkpoint, Light feeds some meatballs to a stray mutt, and amazingly, the mutt shows up again more than 100 jungle miles later, determined to keep pace with what may be the only creatures who ever, ever showed him kindness. From there, the strong-willed pooch, suffering from foul-smelling, worm-filled abscesses, becomes not a burden but a valued team member.
As this is indeed what happened to Lindnord’s team in 2014 in Ecuador, the viewer doesn’t need to suspend disbelief because, by gosh, it’s almost entirely true. Meanwhile, the trek itself is harrowing, with one scene on a zip line so well filmed that it’s sure to cause heart palpitations even for the most cynical of viewers. It turns out the basic footage wasn’t some AI-generated legerdemain: Wahlberg himself hung from the zip line hundreds of feet in the air.
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Wahlberg has made something of a habit of playing hard-luck guys defying the odds, but in this story, the odds are far more daunting than, say, those against bartender Vince Papale actually playing three years for the Philadelphia Eagles (Invincible, 2006) — and the odds against the canine Arthur are even longer still.
That’s about all that can be said without annoying spoilers. The only other thing to say is: Go see this movie on the big screen, pronto. If you’re on a quest for an old-fashioned movie made right, Arthur the King may well be your Grail.
