‘Heart of the Beast’ Review: Brad Pitt Gets Upstaged By A Three-Legged Dog In David Ayer’s Survival Tale

Film stars are usually hired because the camera loves them, and audiences by extension. Beyond their fame and their image, stars like Brad Pitt guarantee an attentive viewer, one invested in the movements and fate of their characters. That’s what makes practically one-man films like Heart of the Beast possible. But few could have predicted that a figure with the drawing power of the Se7en star would be completely upstaged by his sole constant companion throughout this David Ayer film: a German shepherd missing a leg.

If this movie deserves any award, it should go to Odin, the «character» played by a very well-trained dog named Uber. In fact, one gets the impression that good old Pitt is nothing more than the sacrificial human partner assigned to this screen star — the contemporary (and military) Rin Tin Tin that today’s Hollywood cinema has to offer. It’s the dog who opens and closes the film, and whose fate stirs more fear and compassion in us than that of the tattooed, retired Special Forces sergeant James Beltmon, played by Pitt — a Middle East war veteran caught up in a very different, but equally or even more complicated, situation.

The story begins with the dog in the middle of a road, running into a car, then rewinds a week to explain how it got there. The film sets up Pitt/Beltmon for an adventure that’s essentially a confrontation with nature. The man flies out with Odin in his small plane to a beautiful, remote spot in the Alaskan mountains for a few days of camping. He brings gear and supplies to survive a real ordeal, and during the first nights he enjoys exploring the area with his dog, eating, playing, talking, and simply spending time together. Not even the appearance of a stranger (J.K. Simmons), who shows up out of nowhere and spends the night with them drinking, philosophizing, and warning them about how treacherous the terrain and weather can be, spoils the mood.

The next day brings a massive storm, so Beltmon loads everything into the plane and decides to change course. But mid-flight the man suffers a heart attack, loses control of the aircraft, and the two end up at the bottom of a lake. Man and dog survive, badly hurt —Beltmon more than Odin, or at least he’s the one who can put it into words— and from there on, Heart of the Beast focuses on the efforts of these two highly trained «soldiers» (Odin is a dog specially trained for war, and even suffers nightmares from combat episodes that the film renders through hazy flashbacks) to make it out alive of a natural environment that keeps throwing new problems at them, both geographical and in the form of encounters with other animals.

A survival film built on monologues in the tradition of Cast Away, with Tom Hanks, or All Is Lost, with Robert Redford, Heart of the Beast also recalls Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo —through its ex-combatant protagonist, his romanticizing of his own war-torn past, and the athletic, survivalist skills that past has given him. While the combat scenes feel superfluous and lend the film a certain patriotic tone, everything here ultimately boils down to a survival plot with no political context whatsoever. Both man and dog’s military pasts have prepared them, it’s true, for battle against the elements. But what that past has given them above all is a singular mutual devotion, to the point that each seems ready to die for the other.

David Ayer is an expert at finding ways to celebrate American soldiers for their valor and courage. He generally avoids wading into thorny or political territory —Fury being an exception— and what stands out most in his work here is his ability to generate tension out of purely practical situations. Pitt has been asked for more physical than acting effort, though one imagines his scenes opposite Odin (or Uber) must have been tricky to shoot. Making us believe in that mutual devotion, and managing to generate real emotion from it, is the greatest achievement of this survival drama —one that will ultimately go down in history as the film in which a German shepherd proved more magnetic on camera than Brad Pitt himself.