Review: Heart of the Beast (2026)

In Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there is a scene between Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth has a sparring match with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh).  The point of this scene, beside adding a bit of action by way of flashback, is to show how strong/good a fighter Cliff is in a not-so-subtle way so that when he fights off multiple other characters later on in the movie, we believe it.  Heart of the Beast, directed by David Ayer, does something similar with James Belmont (Brad Pitt, again) - albeit in a much more subtle way (I shudder to think what a less-subtle version would be) - having a scene where James mentions his military career to help lend credibility to his toughness in the later lost-in-the-wilderness scenes.

It helps initially, but this script by Cameron Alexander stretches the bounds of plausibility well beyond the point of that early conversation.  The script also defeats the film in other ways, both big (you feel every second of this 101 minute movie) and small (someone involved doesn't quite know how many days are in a week).  By being such a slow moving picture, I had time to not only notice that small issue with the days in the week, but various other missteps that a punchier or more action-packed script would've helped to cover.

There's nothing wrong with a more meditative approach to this sort of story, but (to compare it to yet another movie) much like The Revenant in 2015, there is meditative and then there is draggy this film is much more the latter than the former.  It's not as long as The Revenant (thank God), which is a small favor to the audience.  However, there were far too many moments where it lingered in moments where the extra time added nothing to the story.

Even the one thing that gives this movie novelty over the many, many similar films - the dog suffers from PTSD - barely has any bearing on the story.  It doesn't come up in any meaningful way, and for something that the trailers make a point of showing, the lack of any meaningful arc coming of it feels weird - almost like something was cut from the script.

I've made it four (now five) paragraphs into this review without mentioning anything other than the screenplay issues, and I haven't even mentioned them all.  I almost want to make a quick bullet-point list of all the other problems, but it would edge into spoiler territory.  Plus, a review should also cover other aspects of the film in question without harping on one particular part of it, no matter how bad it is.

The film has three characters outside of the dog: in addition to Pitt, J.K. Simmons makes a cameo appearance as someone for Pitt to exposition-dump onto and Anna Lambe shows up for a part so small the character doesn't even have a name.  Because of this, the bulk of the film rests on Pitt (who is adequate to bad, depending on the scene) and the dog Odin (Uber for most of the movie, various other dogs for flashbacks).

The dog is fine, for the most part, but director Ayer has absolutely no idea how to shoot the non-action scenes that focus on the dog in a cinematic way.  So many of those scenes can be summarized as 'the dog stares pensively at James' that I have to wonder if the screenplay gave Ayer to little to work with that he just gave up.

Dang, I am back to the script issues again...

Since we already circled back to it, I think Pitt also struggles with a screenplay that either has no understanding of how an injured body behaves, or.... really, that is the only explanation.  James goes  through quite a bit of abuse in this movie and whether or not that affects his trek through the wilderness seems to depend on what actions the script demands of the character in each particular scene.  It's almost as if scenes are out of order.

This review is coming across as exceptionally negative, but this movie's mediocrity gives me so little to praise about it.  If pressed, I'd say the cinematography is well done, and Simmons is always a solid performer.  That is about all I can commend though.

Would I recommend this movie?  A resolute 'No' - though I get the feeling that most would not be quite as harsh on it as I am.  A forgettable movie.

4 out of 10