“Wouldn’t it be WILD if a black bear got totally fucked-up on cocaine?”
“Yes, it sure would.”
“Like, don’t you think that a bear on cocaine would just be CRAZY?”
“It, yes, that would be weird, I wouldn’t want to meet that bear.”
“Like, it’s a BEAR, and it’s on COCAINE.”
“I mean, you said that, yeah.”
Thus goes the feeling of watching Cocaine Bear, the new film, based upon a true story that happened in Georgia in 1985, which asks the question, “what would happen if a bear ate 35 kilos of cocaine?” What would happen in fact did happen: the bear’s system would speed up until its heart exploded, in probably fairly short order. But that’s not a fun movie, so Cocaine Bear, as directed by Elizabeth Banks and written by Jimmy Warden, posits that the bear would instead become insatiably violent, and it would tear its way through the the human visitors to the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest like an unattended child with a bag of Halloween candy. Now, the lingering question here is whether the actually existing Cocaine Bear is, itself, an especially fun movie, and to this my answer is: less than it should be. Given that the film truly only interested in the one thing – “you guysssss the bear is high on cocaaaaaaaaaaaaine!” – I think it would benefit from being a lot more silly, a lot more of the time. I get that the bear itself has to have only limited screentime, because it is a CGI effect, not a dude in a bear suit, and CGI effects cost more money per minute than dudes in bear suits. But it still feels like the most obvious problem with Cocaine Bear is that there’s just not very much cocaine bear in it.
To be sure, when the bear is onscreen, the movie sings. Banks is not, in my estimation, a very good director of comedy: her feature filmography consists, in its entirety, of a segment from the diabolically bad Movie 43, the banal sequel Pitch Perfect 2, and the 2019 Charlie’s Angels, which, to be fair, I haven’t seen. But it would have to be pretty fucking good to compensate for the other two. At any rate, her incredible talent for perfect bone-dry comic timing in front of the camera has not in any way manifested behind the camera prior to 2023, and Cocaine Bear isn’t exactly here to prove that she is in fact a genius-level filmmaker. But she does, at least, have a good handle on what to do with a big CGI bear, whose face has been animated with an over-the-top cartoon scowl that is getting pretty close to the outer boundaries of what you can get away with calling “photorealistic visual effects”, and how to amplify the absurdity of such a creature pivoting from just an animal to a giant, hairy cocaine addict, to an over-the-top malicious killer in a film that ends up working pretty well as a parody of the structure and gory effects in the slasher moves that were starting to become extremely tired and overdone right about the time this story takes place. There are some pretty good gags involving the bear, in short, and even when the film seems to be strenuously nudging us in the ribs to make sure that we get just how ridiculous it is, can you think of anything more stupid and ridiculous, it has the benefit of being pretty much exactly correct: it’s pretty dang ridiculous, and pretty fun to watch.
When the bear isn’t onscreen, things get pretty dire, pretty fast. The first thing we learn is based on reality: as a drug smuggling plane was going down, the smuggler, Andrew C. Thornton II (Matthew Rhys) jumped out, only his parachute didn’t deploy – the film has him walloping his head on the plane bulkhead, so he’s unconscious the whole way down, and where’s the fun in that – so he died, and his many, many bricks of coke were scattered across the forest. The rest is where it gets fanciful: the day after this happens, several disparate people all begin to converge on the woods, for different reasons. European tourists Elsa (Hannah Hoekstra) and Olaf (Kristofer Hivju) – the character is credited as “Olaf (Kristofer)” on account of Hoekstra accidentally using her co-star’s name on-camera, and the fact that they decided to just make a gag out of it rather than, you know, ADR-ing the right word says quite a bit about Cocaine Bear‘s priorities – are just there to banter and flirt and talk about how much they love each other, for which reason Elsa is the first victim; overworked nurse Sari (Keri Russell) is there to find her daughter Dee Dee (Brooklyn Prince), who played hooky from school to go paint a waterfall some ways into the forest, and has dragged along her hapless buddy Henry (Christian Convery). Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.), a midlevel member of the smuggling ring, is there to find the cocaine, and to babysit Eddie White (Alden Ehrenreich), the son of head smuggler Syd (Ray Liotta, in his final completed film before his untimely passing); Eddie has been crippled with depression since his wife died, and Syd wants Daveed to help him get out his funk. Bob (Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.) is a police detective from Knoxville, TN, which is where Andrew C. Thornton II landed when his chute failed, who is certain this is the break he needs to finally be able to bring Syd down. Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) is there because it’s her job, but also she’s hoping to flirt with naturalist Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), who is currently on a fact-finding mission to study the preserve’s wildlife. And there are three violent, thieving teens (Aaron Holliday, J.B. Moore, Leo Hanna) who are just around being delinquent shits, giving Liz a hard time, and committing petty crimes for the fun of it.
That is a lot of people for a 95-minute movie that has already promised us that we should care more about the bear than any onscreen human (I haven’t even mentioned everybody – there are paramedics, and another cop). And the worst of it isn’t the clutter, but that Cocaine Bear seems to be taking these people mostly seriously. Ranger Liz is the butt of some fairly meanspirited jokes that work mostly only because Martindale is the only member who seems to have clocked that the goal here was silly camp, and so gives the film its best performance by some distance. The film itself obviously realises that Peter and two of the teens are way more moving parts than it needs, so it kills them off without too much fuss. But counting out those four characters, we’re still left with many people in three different subplots, and the film sort of… cares about them? It cares in a lighthearted, adventuresome way about Sari and the kids, and that’s an easy thing to roll with; it actually cares about Daveed and Eddie, which I couldn’t roll with at all, even though Jackson is giving the film’s next-best performance after Martindale. Like, the bantering comic relief criminals in your killer animal movie are meant to be bantering comic relief, and ideally bear chow, not the anchor to a very lengthy, detailed arc about letting go of grief and letting your friends be there when you need them and whatever other horsehit. It’s a tedious distraction from the ursine shenanigans we’ve been promised, and while Banks may have tightened things up as a director of sarcastic silliness, she’s not really a good director of actors playing characters in stories, and so all of these subplots just kind of sit there, even the Sari plot that’s mostly working.
What this all adds up to is that, for a movie as doggedly proud of its own ludicrous, wild nonsense as Cocaine Bear, it’s actually pretty straightforward a lot of the time, and that… sucks. “Zany black comedy about a wildly murderous bear on drugs” isn’t likely to result in high art, but it’s very much the kind of thing that can provide some effervescent, trashy fun. Cocaine Bear just isn’t really those things, or at least, it is those things too intermittently for the whole thing to come together. Thankfully, the movie starts ramping up its excess, both comic and violent – as it enters its final act, and it’s easier to like movies that backload their strongest material. But this is a prime example of the kind of wannabe instant cult movie that spends so much time promising us that we are having our minds blown watchining a lot of wild and crazy shit, it forgets to be notably wild or crazy.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
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