To be honest, I hadn’t been too keen on this one. I’ve moaned before about having to spend an interminable amount of time focusing on just one actor on the screen and much as I admire Brad Pitt – and F1: The Movie (2025) has become an all-time fave – I didn’t want to be guy that watched him not pulling it off. Plus, haven’t we been here before with Channing Taum and Dog (2022) and Leonardo DiCaprio out in the wilderness in The Revenant (2015). Plus plus, had Pitt never heard of old Hollywood adage of note working with animals and children.
And that adage proved correct because Odin the dog playing Odin the dog is immense. Not much to boast about in the cute department, but boy, isn’t he useful to have around in a tussle with wolves and any dog who can stare down an angry bear would go up a notch in anyone’s estimation. Plus, he has soulful eyes and it takes a good deal of strength for director David Ayer to resist the temptation just to quietly ease Pitt out of the picture altogether so charismatic is the canine.
But then Pitt hasn’t got where he is without having charisma of his own and I have to confess that he belongs to a very small group of actors – Matt Damon, DiCaprio, Timothy Chalamet, De Niro – who you can’t keep your eyes off when onscreen. That quiet intensity that draws you in then says, aw shucks, I’m just a laid-back dude, just stick with me and I’ll see you through.
This ain’t the kind the kind of territory it says on the tin, nothing like the freezing wilderness facing DiCaprio, but if you’ve got a heart condition, a broken arm and ultimately a ton of other crippling wounds, even walking from a remote point through Alaska 60 miles from anywhere (and that anywhere is just an invisible dot on the map, not a town or hamlet or anything, just a flatter, easier, terrain) on a peaceful summer’s day would be a stretch.
There’s no suggestion that ex-soldier James Belmont (Brad Pitt) is looking for a peaceful spot to die, but, for a survival expert he’s pretty damn dumb when it comes to medical supplies for dealing with a dodgy heart, a mouthful of aspirin ain’t going to do the trick. But otherwise, in survival terms, he’s on the ball, and part of the movie’s appeal is watching a survival expert at work, you could be sitting there taking notes he’s so good.
And you would be doing just that if there wasn’t a massive emotional tug that grips you from the start, the relationship between dog and man is just terrific, a buddy movie if you accept one is a canine. There’s nothing particularly novel about the action sequences – plane crash, walking over a ravine using a dodgy log, riding the rapids on your back, battling wolves and bears – but each is meticulously worked out and compellingg, especially the wolf attack.
The scene that sticks most in my mind, however, is the one the director makes not attempt to highlight. Belmont is sitting on an escarpment while his blood pools in holes in the rock.
Both dog and man suffer from PTSD and maybe being away from everyone is a way of dealing with it, and Belmont makes sure he’s packed enough beer to while away the evenings. The dog can give him lessons in survival, can pluck a salmon out of the river with his bear teeth, ignores Belmont’s command to avert his eyes from the bear, just flat-out stares the monster down.
Nobody’s going to be pushing Pitt for an Oscar, not while there are a bucket of more showy performances out there this year, but he should be a good outside bet, especially as he delivers on the most important front, keeping the audience hooked. This has started well enough at the box office but I’ve got a sneaky feeling it’s going to be a word-of-mouth hit driven by people like me who had their minimal expectations overturned.
That old crusty fella you saw in the trailer turns out to be J.K. Simmons (The Accountant 2, 2025), but he’s hardly in it. David Ayer (The Beekeeper, 2024) knows how to mine a great actor. Debut screenplay from music video director Cameron Alexander.
Riveting.
