The dogs of war: "Heart of the Beast"

Heart of the Beast finds two grizzled, battle-scarred Hollywood veterans allowing a dog to guide them. For Brad Pitt, the goal is to continue the onscreen charm offensive that became urgently necessary the minute the details of his separation from Angelina Jolie became a matter of public record. For director David Ayer, twenty-year purveyor of muscular-to-macho filmmaking (End of Watch, Fury, Suicide Squad), matters are much simpler: he just needs a hit. The dog, a comparatively innocent party in all this positioning, is a three-legged German shepherd called Uber playing a retired service dog named Odin; he's first seen wandering out onto a road in the middle of an Alaskan nowhere with an expression that seems to indicate one thing: boy, the stories I could tell. The story Ayer's film elects to tell takes place one week earlier, when a plane piloted by Odin's owner, Special Forces vet turned outdoorsman James Belmont (Pitt), goes down in the state's mossy, swampy wilderness. As man and dog emerge from the wreckage, patch one another up and plot a route back to civilisation - a route that will involve careful negotiation of fast-flowing rivers and nocturnal predators alike - it becomes apparent what Ayer and writer Cameron Alexander are attempting to do here, which is to bring an all-American perennial into the febrile, conflicted, agonised present. Heart of the Beast is, at its heart, Lassie with neck tattoos and PTSD.

So it wags its tail and plays the adventure-movie hits, but it does so with an ultra-masculine, recognisably Ayerian terseness it wears surprisingly well: it's the story you expect, without any nonsense. Ayer arrives off the back of two Jason Statham vehicles - 2024's The Beekeeper and 2025's A Working Man - and you can't help but feel something of that bestubbled, generally monosyllabic star has rubbed off on this director, and certainly on his handling of this script. Odin gives up little more than the occasional warning bark or plaintive whine, and Belmont isn't much for talking, either (the things he's seen); Ayer has to send on a garrulous ex-prospector (JK Simmons, channelling Letterman channelling Walter Brennan) to get the character's backstory out. Mostly, we're watching that rare sight: a multiplex director allowing his images to do all his talking for him. The ominous beauty of these mountains and forests, with their shifting and treacherous microclimates; the scars on the leading man's body. In his better features, Ayer has presented as a capable mechanic, and heaven knows the commercial cinema needs its fair share of those. Here, he gets to engineer a series of involving, sometimes gripping physical setpieces, largely absent from that CGI which the prevailing, outdoorsy worldview would doubtless consider nerdstuff. We feel the propulsive speed of the initial crash, and the strain as Pitt dives into visibly freezing water to retrieve two heavy trunks of supplies (a smarter man might have done it one trunk at a time, but hey); one sublimely back-to-basics suspense sequence involves no more than two-legged star, three-legged dog and a fallen tree trunk bridging that river. True, some of the storytelling falls on the obvious side. We probably don't need this many flashbacks to an unspecified battlefield, though Alexander and Ayer would doubtless argue they underline - even before a final-reel ambush and a concluding Dear John letter - how the latter-day story is its own mission: leave no dog behind.

The filmmakers are savvy enough to introduce the dog in the present tense as a still-standing survivor of all these war stories, thereby reassuring that ever-swelling demographic of nervy animal-lovers. Odin's fine; it's his owner you worry about. Pitt presents here as bulked out in a way that seems far from entirely healthy; you buy instantly that this is a man who's seen combat, but you also come to suspect he may well have started to let himself go in retreating into silent near-solitude and removing himself from the world. (His peregrinations are the difference between a restorative nature walk and putting yourself out to pasture, perhaps permanently.) Certainly, the star allows himself to appear more beaten-up than a Cruise would or Redford in 1972's Jeremiah Johnson did, even before the first of the multiple heart attacks that determine the course of this plot. It's a smarter performance than I expected, informed by a horrible, nagging irony: that a warrior who survived the hell of a foreign battlefield may just perish in an extension of his own backyard. On the surface, then, Heart of the Beast presents as the kind of outward-bound flex every Hollywood gymbunny feels obliged to undertake at some point, but the fresh air and scenery Ayer works into these frames feels good for us, and actually not at all bad for the cinema: it's the American action movie reverting to old habits, rather than persisting with the bad habits it's lapsed into. (It's funny it should be opening in screens adjacent to the reissued Avengers: Endgame, the apotheosis of those bad habits: next to that, Ayer's film can only seem like detox, a guys' spa weekend.) Even after its Winalot Prime ad finale, you emerge with a sucker's misty eyes, having picked up the odd survival skill, such as what to do when confronted with a bear in its natural habitat. (Hint: it's not what Leo DiCaprio did in The Revenant.) More impressively, you leave with a sense of having seen something less pumped-up and hoo-rahing than it appeared from the outside. I can't be sure how much Ayer intended this, but his film offers the viewer a stark choice of takehomes. Is the moral of Heart of the Beast that Odin - stoic, steadfast, loyal - demonstrates all the characteristics Pete Hegseth could want in a soldier? Or is it that America is so comprehensively traumatised as a society that even its domestic pets are starting to wake up at 3am with a bad case of the terrors?

Heart of the Beast is now showing in cinemas nationwide.