Review: “Cocaine Bear”
As the title suggests, Cocaine Bear is little more than a single joke stretched into a full-length film. What would happen if a bear did cocaine? We've seen this type of thing before, but rarely done well. The clearest analogue is Snakes on a Plane, but there’s also Sausage Party (what if a Pixar movie was R-rated?) and most recently Violent Night (what if Santa was a killing machine?). These were all flash in the pan objects of fascination that lacked the depth or cleverness to achieve true cultural staying power. Cocaine Bear unfortunately falls into the same category. It’s fun enough in the moment, but winds up little more than a feature length meme; if early 2010s-era “rage comics” are any indication, memes aren’t known to age gracefully.
The film is very, very loosely inspired by real events — the ‘true story’ moniker is part of the gag. In 1985, a black bear ingested a fatal amount of cocaine that fell out of a plane into the Georgia wilderness. Screenwriter Jimmy Warden fills in the blanks by inventing a quirky Southern peanut gallery to cross paths with the unhinged ursine. For example, single mom Sari (Keri Russell) is searching for her daughter Dede (Florida Project breakout Brooklynn Pierce), while deadbeat dad Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and his perpetually disgruntled tag-along friend Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) are on the hunt for the lost coke at the behest of Eddie’s father (Ray Liotta, in his scenery-chewing final role). Highlights are character actors Margo Martendale as a park ranger and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. as an aloof detective — these two always cherish the opportunity to get real weird with it, and they’re having a ball here.
There are plenty of other characters featured, and Cocaine Bear quickly becomes overcrowded by these doofuses. The film pushes their interpersonal stories hard and it becomes less focused on the bear as it goes on. Limiting the animal’s presence makes sense in a traditional horror film like Jaws, where maintaining tension is paramount. But this is not a movie that’s legitimately concerned with building tension. It’s a goofy comedy through and through, and it’s never a good idea for a goofy comedy to sideline its main comedic conceipt.
When the bear is in the picture, the movie briefly springs to life. The special effects are surprisingly expressive, and there are several moments of gasp-worthy gore. At the same time, Banks pulls one too many punches for these pivotal scenes to stack up to the blood-soaked set pieces of other modern horror movies. Maybe it’s too much to ask from a movie about a killer bear to come up with deaths that are much more than amped-up maulings. Luckily, the few kills not caused by the bear itself are memorable and uproarious. It’s a shame that the third act - which you’d expect to be the most fun - fails to provide anything unique, while dousing itself in an ugly dark-blue filter.
While Banks revels in the purile, she seems afraid to let the movie be even a little bit smart. The film hints at deeper ideas that could have elevated its comedic profile, only to retreat, self-conscious. Somewhere in here is a commentary on the way parents of the 1980s panicked over drugs only to leave their kids notoriously unsupervised. Ultimately, the sharper satire gets buried under all the random gags, leaving only a pat message about parents and children.
The real shame isn’t that movie doesn’t go deep enough, but that there’s not enough happening on the surface, either. A few less characters might have helped Banks focus on what worked. Or maybe a movie called Cocaine Bear was always destined to be scattered and one-note. The film was produced by Phil Lord & Chris Miller, the wunderkind duo known for turning outwardly bad ideas into legitimately great crowdpleasers. Without their more hands-on creative touch, Cocaine Bear only serves to show just how special their talents are. There are plenty movies made with much less passion and energy, but it's mostly wasted on a paper-thin comedy sketch with some neat special effects.
Score: 5 out of 10
Cocaine Bear is now playing in theaters
