So this movie is more than anything, a meme with a movie attached to it. Or at the least, director Elizabeth Banks’s new dark horror comedy Cocaine Bear wants you as the audience to place it in meme status. It’s co-produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, so one can expect a tongue-in-cheek attitude from this product off the bat. It certainly promises a naughty time, and it mainly delivers on its intentions, though there are aspects of the movie where I think it could have taken more of an advantage of the possibilities featured here.
This is based off the real life case of Andrew Thornton, a coke runner who fatally fell from an airplane in a failed skydive attempt in 1985, and the real world black bear in the Chattahooche River park who died after eating Thornton’s supply. In this new movie, the bear not only lives but has developed an addiction to the seductive snow- and is willing to munch through as much human flesh as it takes to get her new fix.
A diverse, both morally and literary, crew of people wind up locked in our ursine friend’s line of fire. In his final role, Ray Liotta is St. Louis based drug dealer Syd, sending out his boys Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) to get the missing goods back.
Young artist Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince, of Florida Project fame) and her friend Henry (Christian Convery) were hoping for a peaceful day painting the waterfall without having to run up trees escaping from raging crackhead animals, but this isn’t their lucky day. Luckily their nurse mother Sari (Keri Russell) is coming to the rescue, and she sort of serves as a moral guide for the story.
Margo Martindale draws a fair amount of laughs in her role as a gun-toting park ranger who’s willing to bring the heat to keep her forest safe. Also aboard is Isiah Whitlock Jr., aka The Wire’s Clay Davis, as Bob, a local cop on the trail of the missing drugs. The events he’s got to deal with would certainly make Clay exclaim “sheeeeeeeit.”
My one issue is how I wish the movie leaned a little harder into the dark humor. Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly plenty of it, but then the cocaine bear cubs show up and I’m like “awwww”. You can also expect some subplot elements on the question of what exactly being a good parent means. The execution is still pretty rude and crude, and I don’t necessarily mind Cocaine Bear having a bit of a heart, but it would have elevated the comedy a bit if they got even sicker with it.
Nevertheless, it’s still consistently funny in a cringey manner (in a good sense). The opening scene depicting Andrew Thorton’s infamous (and fatal) dive, with Matthew Rhys grooving and just totally out of his mind is hilarious but fleeting, and it made me wish we could have gotten some cool flashbacks to Andrew putting his heist together (and that story could have been it’s own movie in itself).
I’ll make it clear, there are plenty of scenes that do push the envelope. The kids trying cocaine for the first time is dementedly funny, as is an ambulance crew’s encounter with our ursine heroine. The victims are offed not just by the bear directly but their own stupidity and overzealousness sometimes, leading to some Happy Tree Friends style gorey gags.
Here’s part of the reason why I’m a bit pleased this is doing so well commercially: it’s a film that’s witty but nevertheless is pretty unpretentious. This isn’t an especially ambitious movie with a ton of things to say, and it almost sounds as if some critics are bothered by that.
I’m on the side who appreciates this about Cocaine Bear because sometimes audiences need a break from “prestige” movies and television. That’s not me saying that filmmakers and artists should be lazy, rather it’s okay to make a ridiculous movie that’s meant to be fun and not much else beyond that.
Overall, I feel so long as you’re not coming in expecting something grand and meaningful, and one is just interested in watching a whacked out monster chomp some fools up, I’d recommend giving this a viewing. A hell of a drug makes for a hell of a B-movie, no surprise in hindsight.
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