For the first time, critics and audiences both love a David Ayer film. It stars Brad Pitt and a dog
David Ayer’s latest is pulling some of the strongest reactions of his career — from audiences and critics alike, no less.
So, Brad Pitt is at it again. After last year's racing juggernaut F1, which more or less printed money at the box office, he's followed it up by starring in something much quieter — and, on paper, far riskier: Heart of the Beast. It's a David Ayer drama about a broken-down veteran stranded in Alaska with just his dog for company. The sort of thing that, frankly, could have been painfully overwrought or just disappeared without a trace. Instead, it's landed Pitt some of the best acclaim he's had in ages, and perhaps the most positive consensus of director David Ayer's career — from both critics and actual ticket-buyers, which is not something you usually get with Ayer.
Heart of the Beast is David Ayer's first film where both the critical Tomatometer and audience Popcornmeter are scoring in the high 80s or above together.
Audience scores vs. critics (for once, it's cheerful)
As things stand, the film's audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is sitting at a punchy 93% Popcornmeter, tallied from over 1,000 verified users. Critics aren't far off: it's showing an 87% Tomatometer from more than 140 professional reviews. For Ayer, that's a double high water mark. It's even outdoing his John Wick knockoff The Beekeeper, which, despite having Jason Statham waxing philosophical about apiaries, only managed a 92% audience score. The point is, both sets of people — the ones with press passes and the ones who actually buy the popcorn — are in rare agreement that Heart of the Beast is worth seeing.
What exactly is moving audiences so much? The reviews aren't subtle about it: they're here for the tears and the awards buzz. Verified audience members are calling it "a real tear jerker," with shout-outs for Pitt and Jesse Oden’s performances as Oscar-worthy. The landscape gets plenty of praise too — apparently, the fields and mountains are almost as big a draw as Pitt’s chin. Another popular vein is the film’s handling of PTSD, not just in war veterans but in military dogs; quite a few viewers admit the emotion absolutely wallops them, which, if we're being honest, isn’t a sentence often written by people shelling out for mainstream cinema on a Friday night.
One Rotten Tomatoes reviewer summed it up neatly with: "Super emotional with moments of levity. Great story line too."
The plot, the cast, and the surprise star
The story puts Pitt as James Belmont, a retired Special Forces bloke who ends up crash-landed somewhere inside the Arctic bits of Alaska. His only real companion is Odin, his military working dog — played by a German Shepherd called Uber, who is apparently very, very good at looking soulful in the snow. J.K. Simmons pops up as support, alongside Anna Lambe, but make no mistake, this is a two-hander: Pitt and the dog. Pitt's been candid about who's really carrying it, saying in a making-of video that "Odin is the star of the film," and most critics seem happy to agree. Owen Gleiberman at Variety cheekily noted that "This is a terrific performance — and Brad Pitt is extremely good too," which is about as much as you can ask for a four-legged co-star.
You also get the sense this is the first time Ayer's managed to get both sides — critics and audiences — ticking the same ‘like’ box. That's not a shot at his older films, but, well: Suicide Squad basically got shredded by critics and adored by the Reddit crowd, whilst End of Watch and Fury won reviewers over without exactly sending fans into raptures. This time, the reunion of Ayer and Pitt, a dozen years after Fury, seems to have struck the right chord and then some.
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