Producers: Olivia Hamilton, Marty Bowen, David Ayer and Brad Pitt   Director: David Ayer   Screenplay: Cameron Alexander   Cast: Brad Pitt, J.K. Simmons, Anna Lambe and Uber Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Grade: C+

If you’re a dog lover or Brad Pitt fan, “Heart of the Beast” should be on your must-see list.  If you’re both, you’re twice blessed.  If you’re neither, however, you might find the survival story a bit too manipulative to savor, let alone swallow.  (Note that it’s one of the few movies nowadays that doesn’t claim to be based on a true story.)

A survival tale set in the remote Alaskan wilderness, it stars Pitt, looking fit but a mite scraggly, as James Belmont, a Special Forces vet who flies his Cessna seaplane to a lakeshore and makes camp there.  His companion is Odin (played for the most part by a German Shepherd named Uber, who’s occasionally spelled by three other canines, all his sons).  Odin was James’s evil-loyal companion in battle, as we see in periodic red-hued flashbacks, presumably in Afghanistan.  The dog suffered serious injuries in conflict and now has titanium teeth and a prosthetic leg. 

James seems not to have suffered physical injury, but from his manner is probably afflicted with PTSD.  Odin is understandably traumatized as well.  After Belmont left the service, he adopted Odin, and the two remain inseparable. 

Their idyllic sojourn at the lake is interrupted by a visitor, a grizzled old mountain man—and damned if it isn’t J.K. Simmons with a beard designed to camouflage him. (You can try to find the most inaccessible place in the United States, it seems, but you’ll still be unable to escape the guy who’s become Hollywood’s ubiquitous character actor.)  The old fellow spends a night in a tent he pitches beside James’s camp, and they talk a bit and share a Belgian ale out of the case Belmont has brought.  But in the morning, he gets in his canoe and shoves off, taking another bottle of brew but leaving behind a book as compensation.

All seems fine until a storm comes up.  Instead of hunkering down and letting it pass, James loads up the plane and flies into the looming clouds.  Unfortunately, he suffers a heart attack and has to crash land the craft in a lake.  Both passengers survive, and James is able to dive to the wreckage and salvage some supplies.  But his calculations indicate that they’ll have to traverse nearly sixty miles of rough terrain to reach a road and rescue.

Of course, they must confront some predictable dangers to survive.  One is an encounter with a gigantic bear that initially stands ready to charge.  Another is an attack by a pack of ravenous wolves.  Then there’s the fallen tree they must try to traverse over a canyon with a raging river at the bottom.  They have to work their way through a swamp where menacing critters reside.  At one point Odin seems to have died, and James weeps over the fallen dog.   But not to worry: Odin does not die.  This is not a spoiler.  Writer Cameron Alexander and director David Ayer telegraph that at the very start, in a prologue in which a young woman (Anna Lambe) driving a pickup encounters Odin in the middle of a road before the story flashes back to the dog’s arrival at the lake with James. 

Without spoiling the last act, it can be reported that things turn very maudlin when the camera returns to the prologue and the woman finds a letter written by James on the dog; Pitt reads it in voiceover.  His words about the bond he has with the animal are mawkish enough, but the score by Jared Michael Fry, which until then has been pretty generic, now turns tinkly with piano runs and a hint of a chorus in the background.  The whole movie has been manipulative, but now it becomes absolutely cloying.

That doesn’t mean that the film overall is badly made.  Pitt goes through what must have been an arduous shoot with grit, though that smile peeks through winningly, especially in the early going.  His rapport with Ayer, with whom he previously worked so well in 2014’s “Fury,” is obvious. 

So is his bond with Uber, not only as characters but as fellow performers.  The canine’s ability to register different emotions is remarkable, a true testament to the skill of his trainer Andrew Simpson. It’s hard to say which of the two stars—Pitt or Uber—is more impressive (a comparison that’s not out of the question since, for better or worse, there’s inevitably more than a touch of anthropomorphism in the canine).  Simmons, meanwhile, makes the most of his limited screen time, proving again that he’s one of the most reliable character actors around—which, of course, why he’s so many directors’ go-to supporting player whatever the role. 

Shot in New Zealand (where Odin previously worked in mountain rescue), “Heart of the Beast” benefits from a raft of great locations, which cinematographer Mauro Fiore uses to strong effect.  The movie does get a mite repetitious, but editor Dody Dorn keeps it to well under two hours, which is yet another thing fans of dogs and Pitt, as well as everybody else, should be thankful for.

“Heart of the Beast” is well titled, since it pulls at viewers’ heartstrings so relentlessly.  And, in truth, it’s not a bad representative of a man-and-his-dog genre, although some more cynical people may prefer the very different approach taken by L.Q. Jones and company in 1975’s “A Boy and His Dog” (based on a typically iconoclastic novella by Harlan Ellison).