Brad Pitt Follows a Dog’s Lead Through a Clichéd Wilderness

If you like Purina dog food commercials, you will love “Heart of the Beast.” The new Brad Pitt film sends his character and his canine best friend into the wild, where the bond between man and dog is the real star of the show, unbroken even under attack from every cliché from other and better wilderness movies.The film wears its love of dogs on its sleeve right next to its American flag patch. The man and his dog are two beings yet share one heart. Mr. Pitt might as well have turned to the camera at one point and said, “So God made a dog.”“Heart of the Beast,” directed by David Ayer, is a perfectly adequate film, but it adds little to the survival movie subgenre. With a little less violence, it could have been a live action Disney movie from the 1990s — “Homeward Bound” meets “Balto.”It follows Mr. Pitt’s character, Command Sergeant Major James Belmont, US Army (retired), a warrior tired of war. After a 30-year career in Special Forces, he hangs up his flak jacket and retreats to the Alaskan backcountry, just to spend time away from other people, but with the combat dog he bonded with: Odin.Belmont and Odin have been through hell and back together in the Middle East, where both were wounded in combat. They both suffer from lingering war wounds and PTSD nightmares. During an early scene in the film, Belmont comforts Odin after the dog goes through a night terror. Mr. Pitt reminisces about how it’s all behind them, in a scene that plays like the classic “The Best Years of Our Lives,” a 1946 film about returning World War II veterans and the wounds they had, both external and internal. Call it “The Best Dog Years of Our Lives.”With a storm approaching, Belmont packs up their campsite, and he and Odin fly out in a float plane. When the duo’s plane crash lands 58 miles from civilization, their only choice is to bind up their injuries and head back on foot. But what threats await them in the heart of the wilderness?Odin, played by a German Shepherd named Uber, is the best part of the film. His expressive brown eyes are soulful wells that show his love and devotion. Small tilts of his head are convincing in moving forward a plot point or conveying tension. He is great in close-ups.His on-screen chemistry with Mr. Pitt — if that’s even the right term for a non-human actor — is very good, though I could have done with just a few less whines that try to underline a moment of comedy or dramatic flourish. It seems Uber’s performance was accomplished with minimal CGI, which is admirable, a tribute to both the patience of the filmmakers and the skill of Uber.But I can respect the difficulty of getting a good performance out of a canine actor while also wishing the acting was in the service of a better movie.Part of the issue is with our expectations that are built into the film’s characters. Mr. Pitt’s character is a combat Special Forces veteran, presumably with some degree of survival training. Especially in the early stages of the film, there’s not the sense of dread or even panic we’d feel for a character with zero experience suddenly forced to fend for himself.For his part Uber is a dog. We can’t expect him to be able to read a map, help pitch a tent, or worry about rescue. War dog or not, even your neighbor’s golden retriever would probably be perfectly content loping along on a wilderness romp.Another issue is the lack of dramatic payoff in a handful of appearances seeded earlier in the story. J.K. Simmons, doing his best impersonation of Walter Brennan, appears minutes into the film as a vaguely menacing wanderer. It seems he might be set up as an antagonist or even a savior later in the story, but nope.After a campfire-side exposition dump, he disappears from the film, never to be heard from again. The same occurs with certain large animals that also appear, then melt back into the wilderness and out of the story. Mr. Ayer reportedly did uncredited script rewrites on William Friedkin’s “The Hunted,” a 2003 film, starring Tommy Lee Jones that has far superior wilderness scenes. The end hunt and fight between Mr. Jones and Benicio del Toro in that movie — 20 minutes of wordless savagery — is one of the best fight scenes of the last 25 years. The successor to that battle in “Heart of the Beast” could have been a faceoff with a pack of wolves. The presence of Odin adds a new element to the fight scene — one human and one dog against three wolves — but the murky darkness and quick edits diminish its intensity and impact. It’s a good scene but feels rushed.There is little authentically moving, utterly spectacular or dramatically groundbreaking in this picture. It’s a perfectly fine film with a perfectly fine performance from Mr. Pitt.The story needed either a lesser man or a more extraordinary dog. Their one heart plus one heart formula doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Brad Pitt Follows a Dog’s Lead Through a Clichéd Wilderness

Brad Pitt Follows a Dog’s Lead Through a Clichéd Wilderness

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