Arthur the King may be the single phoniest so-called “true story” about a man and his dog ever. That covers a lot of ground, although not as much as the titular pooch does in this pseudo-biographical tall tale. Even a shaggy dog wouldn’t swallow this baloney.
The human hero is Swedish adventure racer Mikael Lindnord, played by All-American Mark Wahlberg and renamed Michael Light. I shit you not. Clearly, the facts, such as they may have been, had no meaning or value for the filmmakers, who distorted them beyond recognition for the sake of Hollywood entertainment. A grain of salt? How about a fucking silo?
The movie opens with the 2015 Adventure Racing World Championship (ARWS) in Costa Rica. “Michael” and his team snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. “Michael” retires and goes to work for his father as a realtor or something. Whatever it is, “Michael” sucks at it. I don’t know what his wife does other than stand there and look fit; apparently, that’s enough to pay for their luxurious house (complete with swimming pool and a stunning mountainside view).
Three years and five minutes of daddy issues later, “Michael” is ready to make a comeback at the 2018 ARWS in the Dominican Republic. Incidentally, the 2015 edition took place in Brazil (Costa Rica was 2013). The Dominican Republic has never hosted the ARWS. Is there any part of this “true story” that is actually, you know, true?
By the time “Michael” and Arthur cross paths, about 30 minutes into the film, the audience has already been introduced to and acquainted with the mutt. How director Simon Cellan Jones and writer Michael Brandt could possibly know what Arthur had been up to before its encounter with “Michael,” however, I haven’t the foggiest. Then again, it’s obvious these guys would rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stay on the ground and tell the truth.
“Michael” recruits a new team, including climber Olivia Baker (Nathalie Emmanuel). “Michael” visits Olivia while she’s rock climbing in Oahu. So high up is she that “Michael” needs binoculars to spot her — and yet it takes him no time or effort to harness up and catch up to her, allowing them to have a high-altitude, aesthetically pleasing, but logistically absurd encounter.
Now, if “Michael” is such a prodigious climber, what the hell does he want Olivia for? As it turns out, he “needs a woman” — and so did the filmmakers. After all, you can’t be a damsel in distress if you don’t belong to the female persuasion.
It can’t be a coincidence that, of the four team members, the token woman is the one who finds herself dangling precariously from a zip line, having to be rescued by “Michael,” especially if we consider that that incident, like everything else in the movie, almost certainly never happened. Why couldn’t one of the guys be the one left hanging?
And speaking of outrageous fabrications, Olivia is Hugo Baker’s daughter. The Hugo Baker. Minutes before the race, Olivia informs her teammates that Hugo is “dying of cancer,” and she’s there “because of him,” so let’s win one for the Gipper or whatever.
That’s beyond shameless. Not just because the cancer and the character who is ostensibly dying of it are nothing more than afterthoughts, but mostly because there is no Hugo Baker, nor has there ever been one. If you’re going to invent a black climbing legend, don’t name him after Fisher Stevens’s character from Succession.
The more you watch Arthur the King, the more it becomes evident that Jones and Brandt had no interest in or respect for adventure racing. There’s a World Ranking, qualifying races, an entire format of which the World Championship is but the culmination. As far as the screenplay is concerned, though, all you need to buy a place in the competition is sponsorship money.
By far the biggest disservice that the film does to the sport is Arthur. A malnourished dog, lousy with parasites, keeps up with the protagonists across rough terrain for considerably long distances, and then becomes an honorary member of the team as well as their most valuable asset, leading them to a second-place finish.
The winning team barely beat a stray dog. What does that say about them? What does it say about all the other teams that got beat by a stray dog? Here’s what it says: ‘Adventure racing is not a real sport, and these people aren’t real athletes. We didn’t take them seriously, and neither should you.’
I’d be inclined to agree if I believed for a nanosecond that any of this implausible nonsense ever occurred. Indeed, only a truly gullible soul would trust that these events have been ‘dramatized’ as opposed to completely made up. The filmmakers couldn’t get the easy little bits straight (e.g., names and places); that doesn’t fill me with confidence regarding the important stuff.
The straw that breaks the camel’s back is when “Michael” wonders, “How did that dog get here? … How the hell did he get all the way from here to there? … while we were on bikes, and zip lines, and hiking, and running, and climbing. Now, how the hell did he do that?”
Not the wisest idea to point out the gaping plothole that any viewer who isn’t a very small child couldn’t help noticing. Not when we’re already struggling to make heads or tails of the race as it is. And definitely not when you’re not even going to attempt to offer anything remotely resembling an explanation.
Just because the script voices what we all have been thinking for the past half hour doesn’t somehow mean it’s suddenly on the up-and-up. In fact, acknowledging it without addressing it just digs a bigger, deeper hole. It’s like they’re trying to distract us from the lack of coherence in the storyline by drawing attention to it, but it only serves to highlight the issue even more.
For a while, I thought that Arthur knew a secret shortcut wherein the key to the heroes’ victory would lie. That would have been better than the answer we get — or rather, that we don’t get —, and who cares whether it was factual? Nothing else is, and nobody gave a flying fuck.