Heart of the Beast ★★★
Availability: See end of review
A Two-Hander, One of them a Paw
James Belmont, a retired Green Beret with 30 years’ service, pilots his Cessna 185 Skywagon “bush plane” into the Alaskan wilderness, landing on a lake 58 miles (precisely, from his paper map kept in a baggie) from the nearest road. In the copilot seat is Odin, a retired military vet himself, a German Shepherd who served with James in Afghanistan. The soaring mountains and deep lake and river valleys, the craggy peaks and treacherous glaciers are, to use a word reserved for awe in nature, sublime. The joy on the faces of man and dog, the music that sends the audience up and down with the little plane, communicate ecstasy and at the same time portend (after all, we’re in a Hollywood movie) trouble to come.
James (Brad Pitt) and Odie are one in this man-and-his-dog story.
The heart of the film is Brad Pitt, as James Belmont. It’s virtually a one-man—or one man and a dog—show. And Pitt is perfect for the part. Like his character, he’s lined and grizzled and physically proficient, and the actor has the intense interiority to pull off what many other stars could not.
While Pitt is very, very good, the role is not that of a complex human being.
James is a man who has given up on people, as we learn from a brief encounter with the folksy backwoodsman Watkins (J.K. Simmons), and who has displaced what remains of his emotional core onto the German Shepherd. James not only is comfortable alone, he wants to be alone (except for Odie), and has the survival skills, if not quite the humility, necessary to do it. And, while Pitt is very, very good, the role is not that of a complex human being, and likely won’t earn him the Best Actor Oscar nomination he may be angling for, and that Tom Hanks secured for his performance in a similar role in “Castaway” (2000), in which his character experienced an emotional transformation. James is the same man in the last scene as in the first.
Watkins notes that he sees few people this far into the wilderness, and that a storm is brewing (news James seems to know and disregard). He has camped next to James, to James’s great consternation, and leaves in the middle of the night, revealing in contrast James’s lack of understanding of the beast that is the Alaskan backcountry. The next morning, the storm is upon man and dog; James quickly packs up his fishing, hunting, camera gear, and cooler of dark ale, and heads his plane into the sky. Just when he’s outrun the storm, he suffers a heart attack, a conspicuously anomalous occurrence that seems to have been inserted into the script only to move the plot forward. Odin is thrown from the cockpit into the forest, and the plane crashes into a lake. Heart attack notwithstanding, James surfaces. He miraculously locates Odin, then performs some underwater acts worthy of a Marvel superhero (which in a way, he is). Their adventure—guy with a bad heart and gimpy dog, to walk 58 miles to the road—begins.
The Green Beret training comes in handy. Today’s survivalists will pack the front row.
A riveting adventure story, in the Jack London mode. With enough spooky sounds in the night and jump scares to bring on the edge of horror. Those waiting for alien beings or inexplicable changes in humans and animals, in the vein of this year’s immensely popular (to Gen Z) “Backrooms“ and “Obsession,“ will be disappointed. But there are plenty of other thrills to be had: a towering grizzly, a pack of hungry wolves, a swamp (to complete the Job metaphor)—all dealt with after suffering a heart attack. The Green Beret training comes in handy. Today’s survivalists will pack the front row.
For a while, James (Pitt) and Odie have the tent and mapping equipment James saved from under water, which James, with his Green Beret training, puts to good use.
James and Odin have seen worse, including a mission in Afghanistan in which everyone else on the team was killed. Each has the battle scars (and for Odin, protheses) and PTSD to prove it. A half-dozen misty flashbacks adroitly tell their trauma backstory.
Director David Ayer (“Training Day” 2001, “Fury” 2014 with Pitt) and writer Cameron Alexander (his first major script, one that was on the 2017 Black List as one of the best scripts never made into a movie) have produced a serious adventure film. Their story relies on Pitt, who is good, but not great; the character’s limitations prevent him from going beyond that.
The dog part of the story is heartwarming, but it doesn’t carry the day. Nor does it help that the credits feature a didactic PSA for the 3,000 military service dogs whose lives were endangered, injured, and often lost—a worthy concept but out of place here, in that we’re now asked to feel for dogs in the abstract, not just the Odin that’s earned our affection and respect. Most of the adventure sequences are less than credible. “Heart of the Beast” crosses the line between good, old-fashioned Hollywood and fantasy.
Oscar-winning cinematographer Mauro Fiore (“Avatar” 2009) imbues nature with its appropriate role as one of 2 beasts in the film (though it’s all New Zealand, not Alaska).
Oscar-winning cinematographer Mauro Fiore (“Avatar” 2009) imbues nature with its appropriate role as one of 2 beasts in the film (though it’s all New Zealand, not Alaska). Ayer and Alexander eschew irony and humor (no “Raiders of the Lost Ark”). There is no ground-breaking writing or filmmaking here; nothing particularly creative. This is a straight-forward, and except for the flashbacks, linear story: man and dog, putting one foot/paw in front of the other, versus wilderness. Like Pitt in his role, good but not great.
She says: We had fun thinking about what other male superstars could—and could not have—played James. Tom Cruise (no, no interiority), Tom Hanks (no, no skills and too old), Leonardo DiCaprio (maybe, after “The Revenant” 2015, but can he stay serious?), Matt Damon (no, witness “The Odyssey”).
He says: The scenes with Watkins (Simmons), playing Walter Huston’s folksy but sagacious miner Howard in John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), were obvious, cloying, and unnecessary. Otherwise a good, if over-the-top screenplay until James pens his game-end libretto.
Date: 2026
Director: David Ayer
Starring: Brad Pitt, J.K. Simmons, and as Odin: Seeka, Hondo, Uber II, Ryker
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 101 minutes
Other Awards: None to date
Availability: Showing widely in theaters nationally and internationally. Expected to be available for purchase or rental on major platforms around November 10. See JustWatch here for current availability.
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