James Belmont (Brad Pitt) has seen some shit. So has his dog, a German shepherd and very good boy named Odin. A former Army Special Ops commander who still harbors cacophonous, sepia-toned memories of past missions — they could have happened in Afghanistan,
or perhaps during a tenure in Iraq, maybe both, possibly neither — he’s now retired from the field. But the battle rages on in his head. The same goes for “Odie.” It’s not unusual for the animal to awake startled in the middle of the night, plagued by nightmares and barking at phantoms. Thankfully, James is there to calm him down. It’s the least he can do after Odin saved his life back in the day. These two have each other’s backs.
Now, all James wants to do is hop in his Cessna, fly deep into the Alaskan wilderness with his best friend, drink some beer, and enjoy the solitude of nature. If he and Odie can catch a fish — anyone still wishing that Pitt would do a belated A River Runs Through It sequel will be stoked to see him back casting again — and cook it over an open fire for dinner, all the better. It’s just a pity that they have to leave their woodsy Eden when a nasty storm comes in. And while there’s never really a good time to have a sudden heart attack, it’s especially inconvenient to experience a cardiac event when you’re gliding thousands of feet above the 49th state’s untamed frontier.
Their plane goes down, hard. It’s 58 miles to the nearest road. James and Odie, both injured, have to hack it out and hike through some seriously treacherous terrain. For them, it’s a literal life-or-death struggle. For us, it’s watching one of the 20th century’s last true movie stars and his four-legged buddy navigate raging rivers and fight wolves against a picture-postcard backdrop in the name of entertainment.
Heart of the Beast knows it’s got genuine Hollywood star power on its side. More importantly, this movie knows its primary audience is animal lovers, dads who only go to the movies once a year, and Paramount+ subscribers who’ll eventually catch up with this Pitt ‘n’ Pooch potboiler when it hits the streaming service, so it makes sure to serve all three demographics as soon as humanly (and caninely) as possible. You don’t open your survivalist thriller with a kindly German shepherd staring into a truck-driving civilian’s eyes, then flashing a “One week ago” intertitle, without telegraphing the fact that this isn’t going to end Old Yeller-style. Writer-director David Ayer specializes in the kind of dudecentric movie that makes you feel like your doing one-armed push-ups while watching them, and like his cop dramas (End of Watch), his war dramas (Fury), and his cop-plus-war dramas (Harsh Times), this tale of endurance emits potent doses of testosterone in every frame. It’s hypermasculine cinema, perfect for the stoic man in your life who’d rather face down a pitiless Mother Nature than talk about his relationship with his mother.
Ayer and Pitt go way back (the actor played the WWII tank commander in Fury), which may partially explain why the latter is in a film that feels like something he’d have made in between Legends of the Fall and Seven Years in Tibet. It’s not like he’s above this kind of old-fashioned, leading-man type of work, given his stellar turn in F1, another movie that feels like it carbon-dates back to the 1990s even though it came out just last year. Maybe he wanted to make a rough-hewn process film, which teaches viewers how to properly apply a splint to a broken arm. Or maybe Pitt simply wanted to get his Jack London on, traipsing throughout gorgeous natural terrain and ruffling his co-star’s fur in between fending off feral wolves and navigating impromptu whitewater rafting trips sans the raft. Other than cameos by J.K. Simmons and a bear — respectively, we should add; the admittedly hirsute Whiplash Oscar-winner does not play the bear — this is essentially a two-hander. Or rather, a one-paw-and-one-hander, with the bulk of the movie simply being about a traumatized guy and his traumatized dog trying to find a mutual sense of inner peace. Why, yes, the title does have a double meaning!
But there’s a generic sense of chest-beating that thrums throughout this ode to the power of interspecies friendship that, big-screen scenery or not, gives you the sensation that you’re viewing something designed for smaller-screen consumption. Which brings us to that Paramount+ factor. The look and feel of Heart of the Beast is virtually indistinguishable from the look and feel of all of those TV shows clogging up that particular streamer, which adhere to an aesthetic best described as “Fancy CBS.” Those series somehow seem like they’re courting a conservative audience even when they aren’t blatantly leaning to the right, and despite the lack of straight-up rah-rah jingoism, the whiff of a God-guts-and-guns mentality is all over this survivalist tale. The presence of Pitt suggests a theatrical release was a no-brainer, yet this plays like it’s really programming-as-usual biding its time until it becomes another thumbnail in between a multitude of Taylor Sheridan offerings. For some, that’s a feature and not a bug. And considering the industry deal-making happening in the actual wild, wild west, you can probably expect a hell of a lot more of these types of projects muscling into theaters near you.
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