Film reviews: Heart of the Beast | Resident Evil | Boorman and the Devil
The Brad Pitt-starring Heart of the Beast stays on just the right side of ridiculous to qualify as a modern-day boy’s own adventure, writes Alistair Harkness
Heart of the Beast (12A) ★★★
Resident Evil (15) ★★★★
Boorman and the Devil (15) ★★★
Call of the Wild meets Call of Duty in Heart of the Beast, a prime slice of macho sentimentality starring Brad Pitt as a Special Forces veteran who gets stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with his PTSD-afflicted combat dog Odin after his plane crashes while returning from a fishing trip. Though director David Ayers (who previously directed Pitt in the WWII tank drama Fury) makes it clear from the first scene that Odin survives, he makes no such promises about Pitt’s character, James Belmont, who suffers a heart attack mid-flight and has to repeatedly neck aspirin to stop himself keeling over as he and Odin trek through the 58 miles of dense forest that stand between them and civilisation.
Bad weather, bears, wolves, issues with Odin’s prosthetic limb, not to mention their shared war trauma – rendered in whimpering doggy dream sequences and Belmont’s own periodic flashbacks – further beef up the drama, which stays on just the right side of ridiculous to qualify as a modern-day boy’s own adventure, something for taciturn dads and their 12-year-old sons to bond over while each pretends they’ve got something in their eyes.
Weapons director Zach Cregger reanimates the hitherto terrible Resident Evil franchise with a movie that both honours its source material’s status as the OG zombie survival video game and demonstrates his own singular talent for turning the horror genre on its head. Ditching the ass-kicking heroines of the previous outings (Milla Jovovich in the first six, Kaya Scodelario in 2022’s dead-on-arrival reboot), this one’s de facto hero is a hapless medical courier called Bryan (Austin Abrams) who finds himself unwittingly thrust into the midst of a mutating biohazard when he takes some overtime instead of returning home to face the reality of his girlfriend finding out she’s pregnant.
It’s a choice he’ll quickly come to regret in ways both hilariously gruesome and surprisingly poignant as he learns what’s important in life while battling zombie-like creatures that ingest their victims’ bodies. Like Bruce Campbell’s Ash in the Evil Dead films, Bryan is put through the ringer, but Abrams and Cregger keep him relatable, cleverly replicating the experience of playing the game to power up the film’s own wildly entertaining action.
There’s more horror in Boorman and the Devil, a lively documentary tracing the true story behind the spectacular failure of Deliverance director John Boorman’s 1977 sequel to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Made just as the blockbuster age was taking shape, but when auteur directors still had carte blanche, Exorcist II: The Heretic was a big artistic swing plagued by severe production problems, script changes, illness, clashing egos, an alcoholic star (Richard Burton) and a fundamental misunderstanding of what audiences wanted to see. Though a bit meat-and-potatoes as documentaries go, what unspools is a great behind-the-scenes story, with Boorman and stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher providing plenty of revealing tidbits about the filmmaking process.
Heart of the Beast is in cinemas from 23 September; Resident Evil is out now; Boorman and the Devil is in cinemas from 26 September
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