Movie Review: Arthur the King

In Arthur the King, Mark Wahlberg plays an endurance racer who has repeatedly missed out on finishing first in that big race. Looking for one last shot at greatness, he decides to put together a team to help him reach this goal. What he doesn’t expect is that this race will change his entire outlook, family, and character forever.

The film follows a team of four athletes (Wahlberg, Nathalie Emmanuel, Simu Liu, and Ali Suliman) as they vie for the top spot in the Adventure Racing World Championship in the Dominican Republic. This is an endurance race to end all endurance races that essentially takes racers from one side of the country to the other over the course of ten days and traveling a total of 435 miles. As they move through the race, the team picks up a street dog they name Arthur who eventually becomes their fifth member. As the team pushes themselves through the inevitable hardships found throughout the race, their newest member helps them to redefine exactly what was driving them in the first place and what it means to be a team in the truest sense of the word.

Following up his 2023 feature directorial debut – The Family Plan – director Simon Cellan Jones works deftly from a screenplay by Michael Brandt adapting the book by Mikael Lindnord (Wahlberg’s character). The film moves economically from setting to setting without easing the tension between scenes. For instance, in one scene, the team will be in the jungle facing some sort of death-defying obstacle and then the scene will cut to Mikael’s wife and daughter back home tracking the team’s progress over the internet, making the situation a bit more harrowing for the audience who is now feeling the anxiety of those watching helplessly from home as well.

Such skillful manipulation of the film’s tension courtesy of editor Gary Roach allows the gorgeous cinematography of Jacques Jouffret to simultaneously highlight the beauty of the location of the race (as well as it’s more deadly aspects). This allows the film to move along briskly and never feel like it is sitting back to simply let exposition take the reins.

At its core, however, this is essentially a story of redemption (for pretty much every person – or animal – involved in some way) and as the race moves along, the characters are afforded more growth and personality that leads to them becoming far more heroic than perhaps they were when initially introduced. The aspect of family is also present throughout and that adds to the emotional weight of the proceeding as well.

Regardless of whether you are interested in the sport of adventure racing, the story of redemption and family at the heart of Arthur the King makes this one of the best family films of the year.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com

An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

@miketyrkus

Mike Tyrkus

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