A meet-cute between a bear and $2 million worth of cocaine ends poorly for a Georgia town in this disappointing cross between Scarface and Yogi Bear.
(Bloomberg) — The movie Cocaine Bear is exactly as advertised. There is a bear who does cocaine. Hungry for more of the stuff, it goes on a rampage through a Georgia national park. If that sounds funny to you, get ready for a wild ride. If it doesn’t, you’re in for a long 95 minutes.
Directed by Elizabeth Banks from a screenplay by Jimmy Warden, the action-comedy is a chuckle-generating gore fest, but never quite as surprising or ingenious as it wants to be. It’s not a bad time, exactly, so long as you can tolerate copious amounts of blood. But if you’re going to do a Scarface-meets-Yogi Bear hybrid, it should have more than one note.
Perhaps we should blame an overreliance on Wikipedia, which serves as the “source” for the bear facts that open the movie. The plot is only very loosely based on a 1985 true story in which a black bear died after consuming a bunch of cocaine dropped from a plane by a drug smuggler, who then perished in a parachute mishap. But whereas the real-life bear immediately died from eating $2 million worth of cocaine (sad) and then underwent taxidermy and was displayed in a “fun mall” in Lexington, Kentucky (arguably sadder), Warden’s screenplay offers the eponymous creature a happy ending of sorts. Instead of a dead bear, we get a slew of dismembered character actors.
Kooky cast members that end up in the bear’s way include a pair of drug dealers out to retrieve the missing loot (O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich) for their menacing boss (Ray Liotta); a randy ranger (Margo Martindale) trying to seduce a wildlife expert (Jesse Tyler Ferguson); a detective trying to crack the case (Isiah Whitlock Jr.); and a determined nurse (Keri Russell) looking for a pair of kids playing hooky from school (Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery).
For a movie that runs blissfully short, there are too many characters, which means that non-bear-related plotlines can feel random and thin. But even in this mess, there are pleasures to be found.
The pre-teens who curse up a storm and decide to try some of the white powder for themselves, thoroughly unaware of how you’re supposed to consume it or what it does, get some quick laughs. Ehrenreich, Disney’s erstwhile Han Solo, is the only human who gets any sort of backstory, as a reluctant criminal grieving the death of his wife. His Charlie Brown-esque sad-sack aura clashes nicely with the get-it-done mentality of his partner, played by Jackson, who is trying to deal with his friend’s malaise while bemoaning the fact that his clothes are getting ruined in the woods.
Other humans are nothing more than bear food, there to be humiliated and then gobbled up. Something about watching Martindale clawed apart hurts to watch, and it’s actually kind of distressing knowing Liotta, in one of his final film roles (he died last May), is heading for the teeth. Did the respective stars of Million Dollar Baby and Goodfellas really need to be upstaged by a CGI bear?
It is, to be fair, quite a bear. Crafted by the famed VFX company Weta Workshop, she’s neither completely realistic nor fully anthropomorphized, caught in a weird zone between nightmare fodder and goofy-cute cousin of Smokey. She ends up residing in the uncanny valley, flesh dripping from her mouth as she gives puppy dog eyes to the camera.
Banks, the actor-turned-director whose Charlie’s Angels reboot deserved more kudos than it got, does eke out some solid jump scares as the bear stalks its prey, and the movie seems to relish dropping errant body parts into frame to get a rise out of the audience. An ambulance chase set to Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough—one of many blaring era-appropriate needle drops—is a giddy pinnacle of bear-on-person action, but the rest of the movie can’t keep up that momentum and gets bogged down in repetitive punchlines.
If the two-legged characters, or at least the jokes, were stronger, Cocaine Bear might have delivered on the wackiness of the premise. Alas, there are only so many times you can be entertained by a bear doing cocaine. At a certain point, it’s like watching anyone do a bunch of drugs while you’re completely sober. It gets old, fast.
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