Cocaine Bear (2023)

I went into Cocaine Bear with no expectations.

Honestly, what should I have expected from a film called Cocaine Bear, whose iconography and poster art promised a very binary experience?

There would be cocaine which is, of course, famously white. Then, there would be a bear. And while bears themselves are not red, the word on the poster was. And so were the jagged streaks of glistening blood that would undoubtedly paint the vicinity should a bear, upon using cocaine, happen to eviscerate you.

It was simple and instantly iconic, regardless of how the movie turned out. But as much as I love a film whose entire premise can be communicated by a single image…

…your results may vary

That other movie I just referenced had a premise, of sorts. But after waiting an interminable amount of time for it to be realized, it was good for maybe ten minutes of story. The rest of its runtime was spent trying awkwardly to get off-screen.

Even Miles Davis couldn’t play one note for a whole show. And no actor, however well-beloved, can stretch a cool poster over an entire film. But with Cocaine Bear, I was given hope by the production list.

Produced by the good folks at Lord Miller.

Directed by Elizabeth Banks, the enigmatic and well-regarded director and gatekeeper of the Pitch Perfect franchise.

Starring Keri Russell (Felicity, The Americans), a well-disguised Matthew Rhys (also The Americans, Perry Mason) Alden Ehrenreich (Supernatural and Baby Han Solo), and the inimitable Ray Liotta (Everything), for whom this would sadly be a swan song.

Ray Liotta 1954 – 2023

Cocaine Bear 2019 – ????

How could such a thing not be worth ninety-five minutes?

Well…let’s talk about that.

Cocaine Bear is loosely based on a decades-old incident involving an aerial drug delivery gone wrong over the American Southeast, resulting in a black bear roughly the size of a professional Rugby player eating half its own weight in high-grade Nose Candy. The deliveryman died making the drop, the bear died when it ultimately found and ate it, and that was that.

75 pounds of cocaine is enough to kill anything living (probably). So, let’s all thank writer Jimmy Warden for imagining how things might have gone otherwise. What if, rather than ten minutes of bliss followed by complete organ failure, the bear experienced a kind of Popeye situation?

No, the other one…

It morphs into an ursine mashup of John Belushi and Jason Voorhies, one whose only pleasure – aside from blow – is murdering humans. As you can imagine, this is rendered with all the fidelity today’s mid-level CGI can provide. So, for those who care about such things, yes. The bear is good enough for $35 million.

Does it look like a real animal?

No, but I’d still run away if I saw it in my backyard. Or…would I? What do you do when attacked by a bear? Should you run or fight? It turns out, you do the same as if you were to fall off a skyscraper.

Just close your eyes and wait for it to be over.

Our first victims, a hapless European couple, learn this during the cold open. This is a “Man-Made Horror” film that casts a wide net of retribution, snaring the guilty and innocent alike.

It makes for a fun movie.

But the atmosphere of Cocaine Bear gravitates wildly and randomly between “lighthearted summer slasher” and “that forced eye contact scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson is ritually disemboweled”.

This mean streak appears right from the opening kill. It’s played for laughs, and then it’s not. That’s okay…it’s a horror movie. This could be a choice. Or, it could be a portent of an issue that threatens to weigh down the rest of the story.

Cocaine Bear just can’t seem to decide on a tone.

Is it a fun, bloody romp? A sneering tribute to torture porn? An offbeat YouTube comedy? Yes, all of these qualities are present, but they appear and disappear without the precision of an organized narrative. More than once, it feels as though at some point there were only 75 minutes of finished film and it became necessary to pad things out.

There’s more than one of those Braveheart scenarios, along with some awkward character development that seems lifted from an episode of Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave. Characters in a movie like this don’t need much of an arc, of course. But every time we slow down to establish one, it seems to work against the momentum of the story.

Sari (Russell) is a single mom/registered nurse whose daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) has wandered into the woods with her best friend Henry (Christian Convery), in search of adventure. All three have personal problems you and I couldn’t care less about but they’re all three adorable and you don’t want them to die.

…what kind of a monster wants that?

Daveed (Oshea Jackson, Jr.) and Eddie (Ehrenreich) are a pair of flunkies sent to retrieve the cocaine. They’re each carrying their own baggage, the most significant bag being that they work for sadistic drug lord Syd White (Liotta), who’s got his own timetable to consider.

I was less concerned with the welfare of these characters.

Throw in a psychotic park ranger and a handful of background characters from a Street Fighter game, and then put them all in the woods.

It’s a classic formula, even if the configuration is less than ideal. This movie about a bear in the midst of a career meltdown easily clears its own low bar. It’s an often amusing, somewhat forgettable time that’s hard to recommend wholeheartedly unless it’s exactly what you were looking for.

And you know something? It really was.

The part of me that wants to see every film live up to its full potential came away underwhelmed. But the side that just wanted to have a margarita and laugh at other, stupid people being killed by a bear was amply satiated.

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