Heart of the Beast

Dog lovers who enjoyed the sight of Brad Pitt commanding and feeding Brandy the pit bull in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood have reason to rejoice because Pitt has gone ahead and made an entire dog movie. But if that genre conjures up some heartwarming sentimental family comedy for you, think again. Heart of the Beast is a dramatic survival movie and one of the most intense PG-13 pictures I’ve ever seen.

Heart answers that age-old question “does the dog die?” up front with a resounding “no”, allowing you to instead question how big the boo-boo’s he’ll get in the peril both dog and owner will inevitably endure when a heart attack prompts a plane crash in the remote wilderness for James Belmont (Pitt), a recently retired 30-year veteran of special forces, and Odin, his remarkably loyal and protective German Shepherd, a fellow storied war veteran.

Man and dog both suffer from PTSD and seem to have little in their life at the moment beyond each other’s company. Given how close the two are, that’s plenty. When their solitude is disrupted by a chatty retired gold miner (an always welcome JK Simmons), the two are visibly disappointed.

It’s after the miner takes off that James and Odin suffer calamity and are pitted against the wild in a variety of dangerous forms: precarious tree bridges, white water rapids, a fierce pack of wolves, and the usual elements and lack of amenities one expects from uninhabited Alaska.

A dog movie may sound like an uncharacteristically conventional move for Pitt, who in more thirty years as a leading man has often relished dark and challenging fare. This is a film you could easily envision a more limited actor like Mark Wahlberg or Dwayne Johnson opting to headline. Heck, Channing Tatum kind of made this movie already in 2022’s Dog. But, despite its military subtext and middle America-courting subject matter, Heart of the Beast is cinematic, exhilarating, and mostly in good taste, qualities that have not used to describe films directed by David Ayer in some time.

Ayer got his start on unpolished street tales featuring mainstream movie stars getting to stretch themselves a bit, first as a writer on Training Day and the original The Fast and the Furious and advancing to writer-director on works like Harsh Times starring Christian Bale and End of Watch with Jake Gyllenhaal. Ayer last teamed with Pitt on 2014’s World War II film Fury, which stands as the director’s highest-regarded film on many Internet metrics. Then, Ayer directed 2016’s blockbuster Suicide Squad and has not been taken seriously since.

This time out, Ayer is working from a screenplay by the young and untested Cameron Alexander that made the 2017 Black List of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood. Its path to the screen has not been quick or, judging from insider reports of creative differences, smooth. But none of that matters, nor does the fact this story has no basis in reality whatsoever, a surprise, given the level of detail provided. What does matter is that the end result is thoroughly engrossing and captivating, driven by a charismatic real dog and one of the few undisputed A-list movie stars still out there, whose extremely conventional last film, 2025’s F1, somehow ended up with a Best Picture nomination and a worldwide gross of nearly two-thirds of a billion dollars.

Heart of the Beast almost certainly won’t soar that high in box office numbers or accolades, but it is a fine film that should find an appreciative audience either this fall or somewhere down the line.