Brad Pitt has collaborated with a number of the best directors working today, including Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh and Terrence Malick. He’s also used his production company, Plan B, to distribute more projects than some might realize, including Best Picture winners like 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight. Why Pitt would choose to work with a director like David Ayer, a journeyman without any prestige flair, is likely due to his desire for a down-the-middle hit. Pitt has had some great recent films like Babylon and Ad Astra that took massive financial losses, and even the success of last year’s F1 can be attributed to the power of the brand and director Joseph Kosinski’s IMAX filmmaking as much as it was a testament to its lead actor. It was in Pitt’s best interest to make a solid, mid-budget crowd-pleaser because there aren’t many A-list stars who sell these types of films based solely on their names.
Ayer is a filmmaker who found and then had to rediscover his niche after briefly being tempted by the studio machine. Although his first few films struggled to stand out, Ayer proved he could make lean action vehicles with the cop thriller End of Watch and the World War II drama Fury. Some critics dismissed these as masculine “red state” vanity projects, but Ayer’s politics boil down to moral clarity; his heroes are tough, flawed men who live hard lives, and his villains deserve to be annihilated in the most excessive ways possible. Ayer’s career took a brief nosedive when he had the DC film Suicide Squad wrestled away from in post-production and signed on to direct the abysmal Netflix fantasy adventure Bright, but he bounced back with two ridiculous, deliberately concise Jason Statham vehicles in The Beekeeper and Wrath of Man. One thing about Ayer’s aptitude for violence is that it’s rarely uncomfortable, at least in a moral sense; the bad guys in The Beekeeper is a snotty billionaire nepo-child (who splits the difference between Hunter Biden and Jared Kushner), so seeing him and his cronies butchered by Statham is cathartic for viewers.
The context of Ayer’s career is important to understand why he made Heart of the Beast, which is a more sensitive and earnest survival adventure. Although The Beekeeper and Wrath of Man did hint that Ayer was more self-aware than his doubters suggested, I’d assume he doesn’t want to be known as the filmmaker behind schlocky B-movies. As a former serviceman of the Navy and member of a military family, Ayer has an ability to capture the fraternal honor among veterans that most other studio filmmakers would oversell. Given that Pitt has found himself in the midst of legal problems, he’s also motivated to star as an all-American good guy who’s burdened by trauma and cares about his dog more than anything else.
Heart of the Beast is cut-and-dry with its setup, in which Pitt is established as the retired Army Special Forces veteran James Belmont. James lost his entire battalion of brothers-in-arms in combat at the end of a 30-year-long career, but found companionship in the service dog Odin, who suffered from PTSD after the loss of a leg due to an explosion. The only other actor of note in the film is J.K. Simmons, whose brief appearance as a fellow mountain man is an excuse for James to briefly speak about his experiences to give a quick rundown of his history. Although James’ mission to the Alaskan wilderness was intended to be a solo retreat, a heart attack crashed his plane and forced him to lead a laborious journey of survival with Odin by his side.
Ayer’s smart in determining the degree of realistic danger. James is detached enough from society that it’s not unusual for him to venture into the wild to find harmony in nature; the stated intention is to help sooth Odin’s trauma, but it’s really so that James can process his own. The harrowing circumstances are the result of his health conditions, but it’s not like there’s weather conditions that make his fight for survival unreasonably complicated. Ayer also unquestionably put in a lot of research into the behavior and training of service dogs; it’s a “dog movie” in the sense that it’s a heartfelt story about a lonely guy and his canine best friend, but it’s not pitched in the same tone as Homeward Bound.
Heart of the Beast doesn’t have much going on beneath the surface. Even if James’ isolation and unwillingness to talk about his past are essential to his character, there’s no attempt to provide any meaningful context to what type of person he was during his service. The few flashbacks to James’ was experiences are when the film is at its most hokey, but they’re the only moments would indicate that Ayer is the same director who made glitzy trash like Suicide Squad. Heart of the Beast is his cleanest and most visually immersive film to date, with Queenstown, New Zealand as an effective double for the Alaskan forests and planes. It’s the first film of Ayer’s where anger isn’t an underlying motivation; there’s beauty within the stillness of nature, and James’ dance with death is as much an inevitability as it is a consequence of his unexpected adventure.
Believability’s strained when the stakes need to be raised, but Heart of the Beast’s characterization of survivalism is one of persistence above all else. It’s a series of set pieces strung together but the undeniable chemistry between Pitt and the dog, is hard to fake. Heart of the Beast doesn’t offer any surprises, but it’s hard to say a film with such specific intentions is disappointing.