2 hours ago
19
One man and his dog have an amazing adventure in this survivalist drama starring Brad Pitt, from screenwriter Cameron Alexander and director David Ayer, for which the first and last words of the title have been carefully chosen to signal a mix of sentimentality and thrills. It’s an entertaining anthro-canine-mance, with man and dog relating to each other on a deep level … kind of like Owen Wilson in Marley & Me (only without Jennifer Aniston), or Bernie Winters and Schnorbitz, only without the devastating melancholy.
Pitt, who last worked with Ayer on the second world war action thriller Fury, plays a US military special forces veteran called Belmont, tough, self-reliant and laconically good-humoured in the classic Pitt manner, now spending his retirement roaming the breathtaking remote landscape of Alaska in his seaplane. He is accompanied by his beloved service dog Odin, or Odey (played by four different German shepherds), who saw action with Belmont in various fuzzily imagined flashback combat sequences. Odin took retirement with Belmont and is now his best and only pal. Whether or not Belmont ever had a human partner is never revealed.
Their lives together look heavenly, but a heartstoppingly dramatic event means that Belmont must make an extraordinary journey across rough and hostile terrain, on foot, during which he must look after Odin and Odin must look after him. And the dog is no mere passenger in this ordeal; at one stage Odin gets into a stare-out contest with a digital bear, and a mano-a-mano fight with some digital wolves. Visual effects work, however top-drawer it is, always slightly undermines the feeling of real jeopardy, which here is otherwise expertly maintained. Among the humans they encounter is a grizzled old former goldminer played by JK Simmons (channelling Walter Huston), and Anna Lambe as a young woman who fatefully enters the story at its very beginning.
The idea of a man and a dog having no one in this world but each other is an engagingly bittersweet idea; as well as calling up the hardihood of Jack London, it speaks of loneliness and companionship at the same time. Yet weirdly, Belmont is not unlike Pitt’s stuntman character Cliff Booth in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, living in a trailer all on his own except for his loyal pitbull Brandy, a dog which can go into terrifying attack mode on a prearranged signal. (Belmont has the same setup with Odin.) Booth and Brandy are Mr Hyde to Belmont and Odin’s Dr Jekyll.
As for Pitt himself, his acting chops are tested when he has to sob and then laugh with joy when it looks wrongly as if Odin has been fatally wounded – but truth be told extravagant emoting is not why we love him. Heart of the Beast is a bit cheesy and the final moments will test your credulity, but Pitt is the right guy in the right film.
