As I said in my Resident Evil review, I am working to catch up on things I missed this weekend. As it stands, Heart of the Beast was not particularly high on my “must see” radar. Brad Pitt and a dog go hiking across a remote area after surviving a plane crash. Nothing wrong with that, but there were other movies I wanted to see more. Then my girlfriend said she was interested in seeing it. I was surprised. She doesn’t go out as often as I do, and her taste in movies tends towards fantasy, historic settings, musicals, superheroes, and a few other specific genres. It turns out she also likes survival stories.
So, yes, we went to see a man and a dog cross some mountains.
James (Brad Pitt) is a retired special forces soldier, out to do some camping in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness with his combat support dog Odin. Both suffered injuries and what looks like PTSD. Both have scars, with Odin’s being more visible between some titanium teeth and a leg prosthetic. The two seem to largely enjoy each other’s company and not much else as seen when a retired gold miner (J.K. Simmons) stumbles upon the pair. However, there’s a storm on the way, and James thinks it is prudent to pack up their gear into their small plane and fly back to civilization.
Sadly, they don’t quite make it: in the middle of the storm, James suffers a heart attack, and the plane goes down. Both James and Odin are injured, but James also knows that they can perhaps hike the roughly 58 miles to the nearest road for rescue. They have some supplies, their respective Army training, and each other. How hard can it be? Well, it can be very hard, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make it.
Heart of the Beast‘s script was on the Hollywood “Black List” of promising unproduced screenplays for a while, and I isn’t hard to see why. It’s a solid survival story, and while it is mostly Brad Pitt and a dog, the story moves pretty well. I won’t say it’s perfect. How injured James and Odin are seems inconsistent, and there are a few obviously CGI animals that pop up to menace James and Odin. Still, director David Ayer crafted a movie that is effective more than it isn’t. I personally didn’t care for how the movie portrayed James’s flashbacks to his time in battle against unnamed foes, and my girlfriend questioned some of the things he did as he moved through the area that should have been much more dangerous than the movie made them out to be, but we also didn’t much care in the end.
That’s the basic key to the movie: James and Odin work well together, so even if James and Odin should have died many times over, it doesn’t matter much because they have each other’s backs. Odin is a very well-trained dog. James knows how to move across country. If they both weren’t injured from the initial plane crash, it probably would have been an easy enough thing for them to get back to civilization. They aren’t, though, and that’s what makes the movie work even more. Yeah, this one won’t hold up to much scrutiny, but as it played out, I didn’t mind that much.
Grade: B+
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