Don Shanahan
If you step into the auditorium to see Heart of the Beast for the top-lining Brad Pitt, you won’t feel stiffed for your ticket price. At certain points in their careers, every great actor worth their salt—like so many of his idols and peers before him—takes a chance on a one-man survival movie, and this one is his. In addition to stretching the range to emote the illusions of physical and psychological challenges, these types of films are tests of audience tolerance. You have to be well-loved by fans for them to cough up the cost of a seat just to see you alone without a cast of stars.
The soon-to-be 63-year-old eternal heartthrob and Academy Award winner has long fit that bill. Allowing the makeup team to leave the growing senior creases and silver whiskers on his face alone, Brad Pitt is still a sinewy specimen of a man who has never shied away from letting his gift for carnality shine on-screen. As the retired Army Special Forces sergeant James Belmont in Heart of the Beast, Pitt lives up to the classic Toby Keith lyrics of “I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.” He is precisely the kind of unpretentious and raw performer we want to see in a survival flick.
Just in case, though, Brad Pitt was paired with the most surefire failsafe possible: a dog. James is joined in retirement by his surviving German Shepherd canine partner, Odin. Wearing a prosthetic front leg and sporting titanium replacement teeth, Odin has seen better—and clearly worse—days. Soaking up a fly-in camping trip to the remote Alaskan wilderness, the two combat veterans and tough SOBs are doing their best to find solace amid the post-traumatic stress disorder manifestations that still surge their senses and fill their dreams. This exact type of compassionate inclusion, let alone one sharing in the sympathy-rich battle fatigue of his master, checks all sorts of new demographic boxes for Heart of the Beast. Come for Brad Pitt, but stay for the dog.
People too often take dogs for granted and forget how many superior traits they have to humans. Let this school teacher tell you. Their sense of smell is 50 times stronger. They run three times faster and live with higher immune defense, barometric sensitivity, and cold tolerance. Dogs can hear four times farther and at twice the frequency range. Sure, we have thumbs, but they have claws. Behind the biological tale of the tape are their long-cherished and resilient social-emotional qualities of unconditional love, empathy, forgiveness, and mood reading.
When James suffers a heart attack that causes a plane crash, he and Odin face an imposing 58-mile trek across the frigid, wild, and unforgiving Alaskan wilderness back to the fringe of civilization. Heart of the Beast’s daring survival movie plot, penned by first-time feature screenwriter Cameron Alexander and rescued from the 2017 Black List by Fury director David Ayer, carries instant audience connectivity with the entire “what would you do” gamut that comes with every snag, conundrum, injury, threat, and pitfall that follows, only now we incorporate the capability of a trained Army pooch into the equation. They live for these worst-case-scenario adventures, and we live for being captivated and entertained by them too.
Even so, somewhere, a prissy emotional support toy poodle in a designer purse shivers in its crocheted booties, knowing it’s about to be a wolf’s morning snack if it were cast in Heart of the Beast instead of Uber, the 100-pound German Shepherd from New Zealand chosen to play the adult Odin. While Brad Pitt gnashes his teeth and masterfully muscles his way through the stuntwork demands of coordinator and second unit director Allan Poppleton (Jungle Cruise), he is often shown up—and rightfully so—by his four-legged co-star. Our jaws are dropped by the lengths of performance preparation given to Uber by animal coordinator Andrew Simpson (Dog), military advisor Shaun DeZern (A Working Man), and the dog trainer team of Esther Murphy (John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum).
In a tidy 101 minutes and not swelled into some fatty glamour project epic, Heart of the Beast deftly balances the narrative vulnerability sought between serenity and danger. As the brief, early exposition-sponge appearance of fellow Oscar winner J. K. Simmons provides, there’s “nothing like the quiet of nature,” but that also means there are plenty of sounds coming to get you. The infinite vistas of the New Zealand shooting locations, doubling as Alaska, offer fresh air for peace one minute and the perils of an unforgiving wilderness the next, all thrust upon characters who have already been tortured from the inside out in their past lives. True to his gritty action film ways, David Ayer and cinematographer Mauro Fiore had the right skill sets for this material.
Even with the presence of a bona fide Hollywood icon, the lasting enthrallment of Heart of the Beast belongs to that goddamn incredible dog. As previously touted, one could celebrate Uber’s physical prowess all day, but where he grabs your gaze and devours your soul is in moments of stillness and focus. Captured by Fiore and calibrated by Dody Dorn’s editing, Uber will hold a remarkably firm look that will stare down and disarm any living thing in its gaze, be that a bear, a pack of wolves, Brad Pitt, or us—fixated on the big screen with wet corners filling our eyes. That’s all it takes, and everything else brutal blurs away. Talk about hitting marks. This movie rarely misses any for what it sets out to be.
