Review: 'Arthur the King' combines Mark Wahlberg's bravado and one dynamic dog in an entertaining adventure package

“Arthur the King” is an entertaining enough adventure yarn about a shaggy, scruffy creature who barks and growls while scrapping through the jungles of the Dominican Republic.

That’s the character played by Mark Wahlberg. The movie is also about a dog.

Wahlberg plays Mikael Lindnord, an adventure racer — one of the best of a particular type of racing, in which teams of four trek through rough terrain to hit a series of checkpoints using bicycles, kayaks and foot power. When the movie introduces us to Mikael, he’s racing through Costa Rica in a 2015 race, where his stubbornness maroons the team on the first day of the five-day event. (It should be noted that, in real life, Lindnord is Swedish — and the film doesn’t even pretend that Wahlberg can play that.)

Cut to three years later, and Mikael is desperate to run the Adventure Racing World Championship one more time, to win the title that has always eluded him. He convinces his wife, Helena (Juliet Rylance), a former racer who retired to raise their daughter, and talks a sponsor into bankrolling him. Now he must assemble his team.

He first enlists his longtime navigator, Chik (Ali Suliman), who agrees even though his knee hasn’t fully healed from a career of racing. He then finds a young climber, Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel, from the “Fast & Furious” series), who is persuaded by her father (Oscar Best), a former racer. And lastly Mikael must cajole his former teammate, Leo (Simu Liu), who’s more interested in entertaining his social-media following than winning races.

While all this is happening, director Simon Cellan Jones (who directed Wahlberg’s Apple TV+ action comedy “The Family Plan”) and screenwriter Michael Brandt (creator of NBC’s “One Chicago” shows) intercut with scenes of a rather bedraggled mutt on the streets of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. How the dog’s story intersects with Mikael’s team doesn’t reveal itself for a little while, and only when the race is well underway.

Jones and Brandt get into some intense detail of how adventure racing works — like stressing how they don’t care how you get from one transition point to the next, allowing teams to find shortcuts that often intensify the race. This leads to the movie’s most spectacular sequence, in which Wahlberg and Emmanuel are shown navigating a rickety zip line while lugging their mountain bikes.

The action sequences are nicely balanced by decent interaction by the actors — particularly with Liu’s arrogant Leo learning humility from the determined dog. It’s an effective enough narrative that by the time we get to the finale, which requires Wahlberg to get emotional with the dog, a viewer may just surrender to the sentimentality. 

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‘Arthur the King’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language. Running time: 105 minutes.