Heart of the Beast 

Rating: Four out of five stars  

A caption at the start of the survival thriller Heart of the Beast reads: ‘Somewhere in Alaska.’ We don’t need to know exactly where, just as we don’t need to know who, why, what or when.

A hard-as-nails former Special Forces soldier played by Brad Pitt forges through an unforgiving wilderness with his loyal hound. That’s pretty much all there is to David Ayer’s film. Nothing more is required.

We are, in fairness, fed morsels of a backstory. Pitt’s character is called James Belmont and his beloved German shepherd is a highly trained combat dog named Odin.

James and Odin went to war together and are now both retired, Odin with a prosthetic leg to replace the one he lost in action.

Both these veterans are tormented by memories of warfare, represented by sepia flashbacks.

The devoted pair arrive in the boondocks by seaplane and, although there’s nothing much this mutt can’t do, the aircraft is piloted by James rather than Odin.

The battle-scarred old warrior (Pitt at his most rugged) has come for the salmon fishing and the solitude, and is visibly irked when his idyll is disturbed by a talkative and even more grizzled adventurer, played by J.K. Simmons.

We’re briefly tantalised with the possibility that the Simmons character might be a nutter, but the antagonist in this story is a pitiless Mother Nature, throwing all she has at James and Odin in the form of alarming storms, enormous bears, killer wolves and rushing torrents.

None of these would pose much of a problem for our alpha-male hero were it not for a single flash of mortal frailty: he goes and suffers a heart attack while flying his plane, and from the moment of the crash onwards, must somehow swim, walk and crawl 58 miles back to civilisation.

All he has with him on this formidable expedition is the resourceful Odin, a makeshift spear, basic surgical skills, oodles of courage and of course a full orchestra which, though unseen, accompanies him almost every step of the way. 

From plaintive strings to ponderous piano, James and the dog get a kind of insistent musical escort, like Peter And The Wolf.

Still, the scenery is divine and the camerawork spectacular. Moreover, as a simple tale of a man and his best friend, it’s stirring stuff – like a much grittier version of those made-for-TV Disney movies with the corny voiceovers to which my generation used to lose the best part of a Sunday afternoon, in which a doughty collie or retriever somehow made it home over the Rockies.

As for the performances, Pitt is perfectly cast. We can only speculate, but maybe it felt like an antidote to some of his children turning against him so publicly – reportedly even jettisoning his surname in solidarity with their mother, Angelina Jolie – to be repeatedly licked on the face by a loving German shepherd. 

Whatever, he does a fine job.

But the star of the show is the licker, not the lickee. Odin is played by a dog called Uber, an incongruously urban name for a creature so apparently at home in the wild... and he’s fabulous. If they gave Academy Award nominations to animals, he’d lick everyone.

Sense and Sensibility

Rating: Two out of five stars 

I can’t see many awards being dished out to Sense and Sensibility. Just over 30 years have passed since Ang Lee’s version of the first published novel by Jane Austen, which starred Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet (and bagged Thompson an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay), so I can understand why the folk at Working Title thought we might be ready for a new one, and why Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones was picked to play steadfast and sensible Elinor Dashwood, Thompson’s character in the 1995 film.

Unfortunately, in trying to make the story relevant for a modern-day audience, director Georgia Oakley and writer Diana Reid sap it of too much of that ineffable nuance and subtlety on which Austen’s narratives depend.

Admittedly it’s not easy in this smartphone era – the age of the private-parts selfie, for heaven’s sake – to tell a love story characterised by restraint and civility. But nor is it impossible.

This film bungles it, with Elinor’s burgeoning feelings for shy, honourable Edward Ferrars (George MacKay) far too obviously telegraphed. 

They should be almost invisible, compared with the longing her impetuous sister Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles) exhibits for the caddish but dashing John Willoughby (Frank Dillane), while kindly, unexciting Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum) waits in the wings.

Nordrum, incidentally, is a Norwegian actor, with a slight Scandinavian accent. Why he was chosen to play Brandon, one of Austen’s most quintessentially English characters, is a mystery. 

I was reminded of the comparably idiotic decision to cast Belgian heartthrob Matthias Schoenaerts as Wessex yeoman Gabriel Oak in the 2015 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, all but wooing Bathsheba Everdene with moules-frites.

Why do film-makers do these things? Is it all about investment money? Who knows?

Anyway, I should add that this Sense and Sensibility is gorgeous on the eye, with interior shots like Old Masters paintings. And it boasts some fine performances, with Fiona Shaw in irrepressible scene-stealing form as rich-but-vulgar Mrs Jennings.

Yet it does not, alas, deserve to live long in the memory.