Certificate: 15 (strong gore, violence, drug references, language). Running Time: 95 mins. UK Distributor: Universal Pictures
WHO’S IN IT?
Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Christian Convery, Alden Ehrenreich, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Brooklynn Prince, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Kristofer Hivju, Hannah Hoekstra, Aaron Holliday, Margo Martindale, Ray Liotta, Matthew Rhys, Scott Seiss, Kahyun Kim, Shane Connellan
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Elizabeth Banks (director, producer), Jimmy Warden (writer), Brian Duffield, Max Handelman, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Matt Reilly, Aditya Sood and Christine Sun (producers), Mark Mothersbaugh (composer), John Guleserian (cinematographer), Joel Negron (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A bear goes on a murderous rampage after ingesting several bags of cocaine…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON COCAINE BEAR?
There’s plenty of things you can say about Cocaine Bear, but the one thing you can’t say is that it’s false advertising: there is a bear, and there is a LOT of cocaine, and more often than not the two go together like berries and cream. For that reason alone, I can safely say that you’ll just about get your money’s worth, because while the movie itself certainly has its flaws, the mere fact that there is a movie out there with a title like Cocaine Bear and delivers exactly what it says on the tin (and then some, on occasion) is something of a rarity in today’s high-brow artistic world.
Directed by Elizabeth Banks, from a script by Jimmy Warden, perhaps the most bonkers thing about Cocaine Bear is that it’s (partially) based on real events. Yes, there really was an incident in the mid-1980s when a drug runner (portrayed briefly in the film by Matthew Rhys) dumped several kilos worth of cocaine over the forest woodlands during a drop gone wrong – and yes, a 500-pound black bear really did ingest some of it, although in reality the bear died shortly afterwards. However, since watching a bear slowly decay from a drug overdose is nobody’s idea of a good time at the movies, Warden’s script imagines said bear instead going on a blood-thirsty rampage, clawing and gnawing its way through a horde of unfortunate humans who happen to cross its path. Just some of the potential appetisers include nurse Sari (Keri Russell), who’s ventured into the Georgia forest to look for her young daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friend Henry (Christian Convery) who have skipped school for the day; Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), the depressed son of drug kingpin Syd White (Ray Liotta, in one of his final roles before his passing last year) who, along with Syd’s fixer Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), has been tasked with recovering the abandoned cocaine; and Tennessee detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) who is eager to bring Syd to justice.
Embracing its B-movie slasher roots from the very start, Cocaine Bear doesn’t take long to fully get itself into the swing of things (in fact, it doesn’t take long at all, since the movie is only just over a brisk ninety minutes). Within moments of the opening credits finishing, some unfortunate hikers are gruesomely mauled and dismembered, all while the bear itself is tweaking out like crazy and getting easily distracted by a butterfly. That isn’t even the goriest thing to happen in this movie, as later you get to see people have their legs ripped off – on which the bear naturally does another line of coke – brutally disembowelled, and even shot directly in the head with a massive gaping bullet hole to show for it. As grim as it all sounds, though, the movie does have a huge sense of dark humour about itself, knowing fully well that the premise of a murderous bear that’s also extremely high on cocaine is completely demented, and both Banks’ direction and Warden’s script lean as much into that self-awareness as they can without becoming a full-on parody of itself, similar to how Snakes on a Plane or Eight Legged Freaks ended up turning out.
Also like those movies, though, the movie occasionally struggles to find a consistent tone for itself, particularly during a first half that can’t quite decide whether it wants to be a dark comedy or a straightforward horror. There are plenty of moments where you definitely feel like you’re supposed to laugh both at and with the insanity of it all, but then it seems like the filmmakers are legitimately trying to make you feel scared, which doesn’t always work as well as they perhaps want it to. You go into a movie titled Cocaine Bear knowing almost entirely that you’re getting something hilariously outlandish, something which the film itself is aware of from the very start, so to suddenly be asked to treat certain moments with a level of seriousness and legitimate fear is jarring, because it comes long after that pretence was thrown out the window and replaced with a wackier sensibility that it initially can’t seem to wholly grasp.
Luckily, the film does eventually find its footing and settles on a much more fun tone with the moments of black comedy better balanced with the gorier and more intense sequences. There’s a well-executed chase scene involving an ambulance that gets cartoonishly graphic with its level of violence, but the key is that it still remains relatively suspenseful, without feeling like it’s suddenly asking more from the viewer than it ever needed to. Even just scenes of the bear acting aloof whilst high on the drugs – which, amusingly, it ingests to strengthening effect much like Popeye and his spinach – have their level of charm to them, because despite all the carnage this bear is pretty likeable, merely a product of an unfortunate man-made situation combined with its natural predatory instincts. In fact, a lot of the human characters are also fun to be around; they’re by no means the most fleshed-out or even the best written people, but they’re lively and memorable, particularly Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson Jr. who share a surprisingly sweet rapport with each other, while Margo Martindale and Jesse Tyler Ferguson get some decent laughs as a pair of goofy park rangers.
Although it is at first a bit all over the place, with a tone that isn’t easy to define initially, and a light-as-air plot that they’ve crafted around the central concept, Cocaine Bear is just about everything you’d expect. It’s over-the-top, gory, funny, and at times pretty shocking – and not just due to what the bear does; there’s a scene where child actors Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery semi-innocently ingest some of the cocaine themselves on a dare, which is incredibly ballsy to include in a mainstream theatrical release nowadays – but most of all, it’s a swift ninety minutes of a 500-pound black bear going crazy from God knows how much of the white stuff, and giving audiences exactly the kind of mayhem they’d want out of hearing a title like Cocaine Bear. Again, it’s far from false advertising.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Cocaine Bear is a fun B-movie slasher take on the very real story of a 500-pound black bear ingesting large amounts of cocaine, only here there’s plenty of over-the-top gore and dark comedy to complement the outlandish concept that should entertain most audiences, although it initially struggles to settle on a consistent tone that occasionally wants to seem scarier than it ever set itself up to be.
