Heart of the Beast: Movie Review

Cast: Brad Pitt, JK Simmons, Uber the dog
Director: David Ayer

As survival thrillers go, there's very little new that can be done with a narrative.

Most are variations of battling the elements, taking on adversity, overcoming the obstacles and survival. Director David Ayer's latest, essentially a one man and his dog tale of survival, does nothing radical to shake up the cliches and tropes of the genre, electing instead to add in a thinly sketched story of a war veteran and his dog in the Alaskan wilderness.

A grizzled Pitt is Special Forces officer James Belmont, who along with his three-legged dog Odin (Uber, reliably good boy when needed to look soulfully into the camera), who's enjoying some solo downtime on the Alaskan lakes.

But when the weather turns and Belmont decides to depart in his seaplane amid a storm, he suffers a heart attack, crashed miles from anywhere and deep within the wilderness. With an injured dog, a creeping sense of mortality and little supplies, Belmont has to search deep within himself to try and survive before it's too late.

As mentioned, Heart of the Beast follows every conventional path of the man alone narrative and rarely does anything exceptionally new with it.

Opening with a series of shots that could function both as a hunting and fishing tourism ad for New Zealand where it was shot and for a nostalgic return to the waters for the former A River Runs Through It star, the film's writers know they have a struggle on their hands to keep the ebb and flow going early on and to get audiences to invest in both Belmont and to a lesser extent, the three-legged dog.

But by deploying a cameo from an exposition-filled and background-questioning JK Simmons as a former goldminer who happens to wander by for a few beers, the film falls back on lazy writing before the main event takes place. Along with hazy flashbacks to a mission that went wrong for Belmont and Odin, the film's threadbare narrative is already pulled tight before it's even begun.

Pitt's perfectly fine and appears to muster some of the depth Belmont needs, but there's little here that's essential - and Ayer uses lazy transitions of Odin looking pained to serve as reactions, a trick that soon overstays its welcome after the third or fourth use.

So what's left for Heart of the Beast?

Some wobbly CGI animals, a series of hostile encounters with a bear and also wolves, some cheesy moments you can see a mile off and the film itself stumbles when really its intimate nature should be what sets it apart. 

It may be handsomely shot and there is one moment when an aurora is reflected in Odin's eye that is a marvel, but adding in mawkish manipulative piano music, a bizarre pre-credits heartstring-pulling coda and piling on the cliches sadly does little for the Heart of this Beast.