As the pandemic wound down (did it really wind down?) some big audience pleasers returned to theaters. This old-fashioned horror comedy had a couple of big weekends without becoming an enormous hit. With its notable cast from TV and streaming, it definitely had the ingredients for a breakout event. Everybody likes Keri Russell of Felicity and The Diplomat, and Alden Eherenreich and Margo Martindale have positive recognition factor. Cocaine Bear aims to deliver good mindless thrills, and we can see it being great fun with a raucous audience. Ten assorted movie types — crooks, cops, a mom and some kids — are terrorized by a deranged monster. It’s not a space alien or demon from hell, just an ordinary black bear. But it’s been driven crazy by consuming mass quantities of cocaine. If that’s not a sure-fire story hook, what is?
To some this may sound like ‘Low Expectations Theater,’ but we think there ought to be place in moviegoing for all kinds of pictures. Cocaine Bear generates a fun anticipation of old-fashioned matinee thrills . . . make that old-fashioned ‘R’-rated matinee thrills.
The show is based on a true incident, the same way that The Wizard of Oz is based on the reality of tornadoes. A misguided smuggler tried to parachute out over a forest with his drug cargo, D.B. Cooper– style. His chute didn’t open, but the story didn’t end there — investigators found that a bear broke into a bag of cocaine and died after eating a brick or two. Screenwriter Jimmy Warden spun this Ursine tragedy into a body-count horror show, bouncing between light comedy and graphic gore. The slaughter of civilians follows the horror play book — various ‘amusing’ innocents become Bear Chow but anointed Nice Folk are spared. On the other hand, the mayhem among the cops and crooks survive in a much less predictable way.
Apparently high himself, parachutist drug runner Thornton (Matthew Rhys of The Post) scatters several cocaine-filled sports bags over the hills of Georgia, but doesn’t survive the fall. Not long afterward, two Dutch hikers (Kristofer Hivju of Game of Thrones & Hannah Hoekstra) are attacked by a crazed Cocaine Bear. To avoid a reprisal from the cartel for losing so much ‘product,’ Thornton’s associate Syd (star Ray Liotta, in his last movie) forces his pal Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr. of Straight Outta Compton) and his reluctant son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich of Hail, Caesar!) to rush to the forest in a recovery mission. Some hopped-up petty crooks have gotten there first, so Daveed and Eddie force the foolish Stache (Aaron Holiday) to lead them to a gazebo where a bag of cocaine is stashed.
All this happens on a day that grade schoolers Henry and Dee Dee (Christian Convery & Brooklyn Prince) decide to cut class and sneak off to the forest so Dee Dee can paint a waterfall. Dee Dee’s mother, nurse Sari (star Keri Russell) rushes to the park to find them, only to be slowed down by two Park Rangers, the irritatingly patronizing Peter and Liz ( Margo Martindale of Ride with the Devil, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson). And also rushing to the scene are the smart drug enforcement officers Bob and Reba (Ayoola Smart, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. of Da 5 Bloods).
The armed cops, thugs and gangsters clash even before the bear attacks, while the pea-brained Park Rangers give Sari a hard time. Two paramedics arrive, only to find themselves face-to-face with the killer bear. The punks that mingle with samples of recovered cocaine are at a real disadvantage, because the bear can smell the stuff from a mile away. Even little Henry and Dee Dee play with a brick of white powder. They separate when attacked — forcing Sari to undertake a panicked search as well.
The very good actors are mostly underused, filling out roles that take none of them in a memorable direction. The star here is the ‘monster’ bear, fueled by cocaine. Director Banks resists the Jaws gambit of making the she-bear enormous; normal-big is big enough. A one point it simply falls asleep atop a cringing human, pinning him to the ground with perhaps 500 (?) soft pounds. Ms. Banks is fond of Jack Arnold® jump scares, as an unexpected bear claw must reach into the frame at least 5 times. The compositions for some of these telegraph the gag, but they work anyway.
The cocaine-deranged she-bear is first observed acting erratically, butting its head against trees. She plows into piles of the white stuff, just like Al Pacino in the Scarface remake. It’s like a new version of a Cheech & Chong movie — seriously Under the Influence, the bear staggers and stumbles and shakes its head. But it also reacts to its cocaine high by getting seriously pissed off, and ripping people to pieces. Knowing the crowd that would turn out for a show titled Cocaine Bear, we can picture total audience approval for the she-bear’s drug-fueled onslaught.
The bear is mostly high-grade CGI work created by an army of pixel-pushing artists. Her erratic actions are convincing and credible, and director Banks has resisted the temptation to turn her into a clown. She’s believable when galloping after a fleeing ambulance — and leaping into it in a slow-motion, as might a Marvel superhero. Just like Yogi, this is no average bear.
Nobody thinks getting a dog drunk for laughs is acceptable behavior anymore, and audiences would not likely be amused seeing it dramatized on screen, either . Yet it’s pretty funny when the dizzy-brained she-bear looks inebriated. Cocaine Bear wants to have it both ways: the ‘family in jeopardy’ scenes could have come from a Hallmark Movie, yet one scene depicts two ten-year-olds trying to eat cocaine. They spit it out in disgust … does that make it okay?
The gore will disturb some audiences, while giving confirmed gorehounds something to chuckle about. The grossout scenes play out like Grand Guignol, with legs ripped off and an arm folded in half. An accidental gunshot results in head injury only a little less unsettling than the dreadful spatter mess in Fulci’s The Beyond. Some of these ha-ha (?) gags have a Herschel Gordon Lewis appeal, only with convincing special effects. The face of a woman thrown from a speeding car is ground into the asphalt, which is just the giddy gross-out horror audience wants. Think of the craziest scenes in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator: “Oh no, they aren’t going to do that!“
But the movie also wants to be ‘nice.’ The third act goes against the nihilism of popular horror items like Wes Craven’s Scream. The ‘nice’ refers to present-day PC conventions. Nurse Sari is assertive, and so is her daughter, who left a Hansel & Gretel trail as she fled the cocaine bear. The worst lowlifes get shredded by the she-monster, but some ‘Good’ drug criminals squeak by untouched. A possible sign of Script By Committee may be the emphasis on an adorable pet dog. Yes, that was a human being disemboweled, but isn’t the puppy cute?
The direction is mostly good, especially the nicely storyboarded Bear Vs. The World violence. The scenery is gorgeous. Ireland apparently stands in for Georgia, and they do a good job of faking it. The movie isn’t very stylish, as can be seen in the finale in a rather dull cavern, that makes us yearn for the excitement of Tom Sawyer’s cave. But the director knows to sell the violent gags through the extreme reactions of her cast, whether terrified-goofy or just plain terrified.
The movie indulges in three or four post-Tarantino mini-flashbacks, mostly to set up characters. One shows a narrative event that was ‘skipped’ — Daveed mentions that they saw a corpse a few minutes back, and we get a flashback glimpse of its half-eaten head. Perhaps we missed a clue — we’re not entirely sure whose corpse it is.
As said above, the actors are good but none really kicks the drama/fun up to a higher level. Keri Russell isn’t the riveting presence of her great TV work, while the underplaying of the late Ray Liotta feels too much like general exhaustion. We assume everybody had a great time on the Irish locations.
Cocaine Bear is a gross-out comedy for a specialized but enthusiastic audience. Some moviegoers will find it too cruel, and the hardcore fans will object to the concessions made to Spielberg-ish PG-13 values (it’s R, by the way). Our personal reaction? We like it more than the Spielberg monolith’s Jurassic Park movies, which only pretend to put their all-family casts in jeopardy, and instead kill off characters deemed unpleasant, inconsequential or inconvenient. Director Banks at least tries to give all of her bear-bait victims endearing personalities.
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