Cocaine Bear’s appeal starts – and, for many, ends – with its title. The movie promises one thing – a bear high on cocaine – and the only question is which approach director Elizabeth Banks will take: the one that treats it seriously and says “this is the scariest thing ever,” or the one that says “we’re making a movie called Cocaine Bear. Isn’t that crazy?”
Banks – supported by producers Christopher Lord and Phil Miller, who never met a crazy premise they could ignore – wisely takes the second route, leaning into the humor and carnage that collide under its absurd premise. And whether you like it or loathe it, you will probably walk away going: “yep; that’s exactly what I thought a movie called Cocaine Bear would be.”
Very loosely based on a true story from the 1980s, the film rockets to a start with an unhinged opening, as a drug mule (Matthew Rhys) drop-kicks cocaine out of a crashing plane before banging his head and plummeting to his death. The cocaine scatters throughout a Tennessee forest and is ultimately consumed by a black bear. The drug sends the bear into a killing frenzy, putting it on a collision course with a mother (Keri Russell) looking for her kids, a gang of low-life criminals (Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson Jr.) trying to get the cocaine back for their boss (Ray Liotta), some wayward teens, and a love-struck ranger (Margo Martindale) and her redneck paramour (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). Isiah Whitlock Jr. also plays a detective on the trail of the missing cocaine. Most of them, of course, end up as bear food, although a few meet unexpectedly grisly (but non-grizzly) ends.
The question of whether Cocaine Bear is good or bad is likely impossible to answer, as being described as “good” would probably go against the spirit of the enterprise. It’s trash that knows that it’s trash, told with just the right mixture of carnage and comedy. Jimmy Warden’s script wisely peppers the moments between bear attacks with absurdist humor. There’s a moment involving the ranger trying to shoot the bear – and being a particularly bad shot – that ends in a shocking burst of violence that is gross and funny all at once, and a standoff at a gazebo between Whitlock’s character and the drug runners that veers off into several weird and funny tangents.
The cast is largely game for the craziness, and Cocaine Bear gains a lot from their willingness to play the material as broadly as many of them do. Putting Martindale in as a curmudgeonly park ranger and Ray Liotta in as an intimidating drug kingpin is obvious casting, but both actors gleefully play into their types. There’s fun comedic chemistry between Jackson and Ehrenreich, with the latter in mourning over his wife’s death and the former constantly perplexed by the absurdity of their situation. Russell’s a capable actress but largely left floundering as the straight woman, and to be honest, the subplot of the suburban mom trekking to save her kids is a pinch of sweetness the movie probably could have done without.
Banks understands that the film’s main appeal is to watch a bear go crazy on scuzzy characters, and she stages the attack sequences with an unbridled sense of glee at the carnage, punctuated with just the right amount of humor. The film’s high point is an attack on an ambulance that includes several moments that elicit gasps, laughs and screams, all within the space of about five minutes. Here and in the aforementioned gazebo sequence, the film achieves the perfect balance of violence and humor, delivering on the weirdness of its title’s promise.
But as good as Cocaine Bear gets in its best moments, it really only gets as good as a movie called Cocaine Bear can. At heart, it’s still just a meme of a movie, its good stretches spaced out by wheel-spinning to force the characters where the plot dictates they should be. While certain comedic performances are solid, others such as Ferguson’s are shrill, and the film’s go-to joke of children swearing or inadvertently ingesting cocaine are tasteless without ever being really funny. The film can’t decide whether the bear is a threat to be feared or an innocent creature deserving of our sympathy, and cocaine quickly turns from a catalyst for disaster into the animal’s super power, energizing it like Popeye eating spinach.
Aaron Holliday and O’Shea Jackson Jr. in “Cocaine Bear.”
The high truly begins to wear off in the film’s final stretch, which features one of the most baffling uses of a flashback to deliver important information ever seen, and largely takes place filmed in muddy darkness. The film has spent so much time offering up cartoon characters that it can’t figure out quite where to leave them, and so it just peters out. But (spoiler alert), if you’ve ever wanted to see a drug lord disemboweled by baby bears, you’ll get your wish. So, there’s that.
Those who go into Cocaine Bear eager to see the film deliver on its title’s promises will probably walk away satisfied – and as a comparison point, it has much less in common with the truly empty Snakes on a Plane (2006) and finds an entertaining tone more comparable to the trashter-piece Final Destination 2 (2003), from the same director. Those who hear the title and want nothing to do with it will regret nothing by skipping out. Is it good or bad? Does it matter? It’s Cocaine Bear. It is what it is, and whether that thing is appealing is up to you.
