It may be a rite of passage for every actor of a certain age to do their “alone in the wilderness movie.” Brad Pitt’s mentor, Robert Redford, was about a decade and a half older than Pitt when he made his, the 2013 lost-at-sea film All Is Lost. Now Pitt is back in a similar milieu where Redford shot him in A River Runs Through It, except a lot farther north, with David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast, a movie that dog lovers should lap up.

It’s not definite who is the beast of the title, but if we’re taking it literally, that’s Odin, a German shepherd who is a retired combat dog, and has got the scars to prove it. While working alongside special forces officer James Belmont (Pitt) in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, Odin lost part of a leg and a significant number of teeth, which were then replaced by fearsome-looking titanium substitutes. He can attack on command, but more than anything he is a loyal and almost preternaturally expressive companion to James, as James wiles away his own post-traumatic retirement on sojourns into the Alaskan wilderness and other such adventures.

On this particular occasion, James has flown his seaplane into a lake surrounded by mountains, the kind of place where not a soul can find him – which will present a problem as the story progresses. While camping out and enjoying the solitude, James does cross paths with a man paddling down 200 miles of Alaskan river, played by J.K. Simmons. James is conscious of every possible threat, especially in an environment without nearby help, but he correctly clocks this man as a harmless old coot, and offers him a beer over a campfire.

It’s while hopping to the next locale that James and Odin encounter trouble. James starts to have a heart attack at the controls, and can’t do anything about it before it incapacitates him. When the plane crashes fortuitously in a lake, James and his best friend must figure out exactly where they are, and exactly how to get back to any sort of civilisation to treat their injuries and perhaps rethink their life choices.

James Belmont is the sort of character Pitt loves to play, one with a lot of physicality – though with how much of their food he takes from his own mouth to give to the dog, there’s hardly any left for a performer who prefers to say his lines through mouthfuls. But that also shows the kind of saint James is, at least when it comes to the dog. James is also a perfect character for a David Ayer movie, since Ayer has built his career on military adjacency. Sometimes that tendency comes across as a wee bit fascist, but here it mostly manifests in James always having the right gadget, trick or makeshift solution for any survival challenge.

This can be comical at times, since the story is constructed on repeatedly separating James from his provisions. Yet with every increasingly smaller version of his stuff, James still has something squirreled away in a jacket pocket to start a fire in a rain storm, that sort of thing. And if this comes with a light dose of American exceptionalism, we’ll just have to take it.

And for the most part, we do want to take it. This is a well-crafted film that presents the Alaskan wilderness in all its glory and ferocity. Only the flashbacks to battles from their shared past feel a little hacky, relying on a stylised film stock and changes to the speed of the action. Fortunately, Ayer is content to background the military stuff this time, and the foreground is quite compelling.

And what a dog. Odin – who is credited in the cast as Odin, and using his actual name surely helped coach the performance – has a way of looking at James as though he’s staring deep into the grizzled man’s thorny soul. But accepting it without a shred of judgment, of course; in fact, quite the opposite. Odie, as James calls him – quite different from the dog in the old Garfield cartoons – is the kind of pooch for whom the phrase “man’s best friend” was coined. While Redford only had a boat to play off in All is Lost, Pitt has an indispensable co-star who always draws out the emotional core of a man who has spent his life behind a protective shell.

The narrative itself shifts confidently between engaging set pieces that James and Odin usually navigate with at least a modicum of believability. There are a few improbable occurrences along the way – if you’ve seen the trailers, you know that a pack of wolves factors into the proceedings – but they keep this at the level of only a slightly heightened trek through these landscapes. And since it’s a movie starring a famous Hollywood actor, that’s pretty much where you want it to be.

 

Heart of the Beast opens tomorrow in Australian cinemas.