Heart Of The Beast

There comes a time in many actors' lives when they just want to fight for survival, or perhaps simply take centrestage to showcase their abilities. Robert Redford opted for the sea with All Is Lost, while Tom Hanks became an island Castaway, Matt Damon chose space in The Martian. But one of the most popular choices for toughing it out remains the American Wilderness, with Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant) and Harrison Ford (The Call Of The Wild) just two that immediately spring to mind. Now Brad Pitt adds his name to the list as retired Special Forces officer James Belmont, whose seaplane trip to the wilds of Alaska with his faithful, three-legged PTSD-suffering service dog Odin proves not to be the fishing and birding break that he imagined.

Those who want to make David Ayer's film more interesting than it has any right to be, might want to imagine all the Terrible/Awesome Clichés That Could Happen In The American Wilderness and construct a mental bingo card to tick them off. Spoiler warning: There's a good chance you're going to get a full house.

Here's one to start you off, since it's in the Paramount plot synopsis - the inevitable plane accident, which happens conveniently not long after we've learned about poor old Odin's night terror flashbacks to his time in a conflict zone. This leaves Belmont and the dog stranded miles from anywhere, from which point they spend the rest of the film on a man-and-dog style Incredible Journey, trying to get back to civilisation.

The soulful face of Odin (mostly played by Uber) is the main reason to watch this film, as he generates the vast majority of the sympathy, while Belmont just gets banged up a lot, although, of course, no matter how awful the event, Pitt's face barely gets a scratch. The set pieces aren't bad, although marred by CGI animals that throw you out of the movie, and a predictability that robs them of intensity.

Adding to the cliché factor is a score that leans into syrup and where the interludes involving talented Alaskan Inuit group Pamyua feel more like set dressing than substance.

As the title indicates, The Heart Of The Beast is also as red-blooded, conservative middle American burger of a film. There's no suggestion that warzones are anything but a place where heroes are born and die and former soldiers are so hard that no matter what happens to them crunching a few aspirins does the trick. And like all good American burgers, it comes smothered in cheese.

Reviewed on: 23 Sep 2026