107 min | PG-13 | March 15, 2024 | Lionsgate
Mark Wahlberg does an adventure race through the Dominican Republic and adopts a stray dog. Based on a true story that is genuinely remarkable. The dog acts better than most of the humans.
Michael Light is a past-his-prime adventure racer assembling one last team for the Adventure Racing World Championship. The race spans 435 miles of jungle, river, and mountain over ten days. Midway through, a stray dog starts following the team. They feed it a meatball. The dog will not leave. They name it Arthur. The true story this is based on is extraordinary enough that the film barely needs to embellish. A beaten, starving street dog chose a team of humans and ran hundreds of miles with them through some of the most punishing terrain on earth.
Mark Wahlberg plays Michael with his usual workmanlike intensity. He is not stretching here. He is doing what he does. Simu Liu plays Leo, a teammate, with enough character to register. Nathalie Emmanuel plays Olivia with competence and little else. Juliet Rylance plays Michael’s wife Helen in scenes that exist to establish personal stakes. The human performances are adequate. The dog is magnetic. Every scene with Arthur has an emotional authenticity that the scripted human drama cannot match.
Simon Cellan Jones directs with an emphasis on the physical reality of adventure racing. The race sequences are shot on location and the terrain is punishing and beautiful. The film does not fake the difficulty. The river crossings and jungle treks have a physicality that puts the audience in the mud. The cinematography captures the Dominican Republic with sweeping beauty. The pacing is conventional but the runtime does not drag.
The film works because the dog is real and the story is real and no amount of formulaic sports-movie structure can diminish what actually happened. Wahlberg’s character arc is predictable. The team dynamics are standard. The dog transcends all of it. Arthur limping alongside exhausted humans through a jungle is more emotionally honest than anything the screenplay constructs. Sometimes the true story does the heavy lifting. This is one of those times.