Review: Cocaine Bear

When a whole bunch of cocaine falls out of a plane and into a forest, only one animal has the guts to investigate: Cocaine Bear. Don't worry, she's actually called "Cocaine Bear" more than once, just in case you forgot what movie you were watching. 

Anyway, Cocaine Bear eats a bunch of cocaine and gets high as balls just in time for a variety of chumps to wander into the park. Turns out it isn't just weed that gives you the munchies.

Cocaine Bear is the kind of movie where the title is the joke, and whatever you're imagining as the punchline to that joke is probably better than what director Elizabeth Banks and her team put on the screen. Which isn't to say this is a dud: for one thing, it only goes 90 minutes. For another, it's surprisingly gory. For a third... cocaine?

Hollywood has loved movies about rampaging apex predators since, oh, lets say King Kong, though Jaws is probably the more relevant example here. As this is meant to be a "real" movie and not, say, Sharkansas (in which women prisoners are sent out to work in a swamp full of great white sharks), it is not just a collection of scenes in which a crazed bear eats people. This is cinema's loss, especially as every single scene that doesn't involve Cocaine Bear eating people is completely forgettable.

(this is based on "true events", in that a drug smuggler really did dump a bunch of cocaine out of a plane, and a bear did eat a - very small - amount of it. That's it for reality and this film)

It's not that the choice to tell a fairly grounded story about a bear high on cocaine in 1985, the last year when cocaine was a problem in America, was a mistake; this wants to mine the ludicrous nature of the scenario for black comedy, not go all out for exploitation thrills. So Cocaine Bear doesn't do impossible things like snort lines of Columbia's finest, though licking it off a severed leg is fine.

Likewise, a final act swerve into making Cocaine Bear a force for, well, not exactly good, but for only eating specific irredeemable bad guys (after spending much of the movie chomping random hippies and greenies) doesn't completely derail the movie. By this stage we've become attached to the few remaining humans, so focusing on only chomping scum is as good a choice as any.

But where this fails down is that, for a movie about a bear high on cocaine, this just isn't anywhere near as fun as it should be. For example, there are kids in this movie! Kids don't get eaten in Hollywood movies - why are there any people in this movie who are not in constant danger of being eaten? Especially when the only mildly transgressive thing they do - look, the forest is full of cocaine, you figure it out - results in no effects for good or ill?

And while the choice to keep events plausible is a reasonable one, it's definitely not the most exciting one. Why wasn't this a movie where a bunch of drug dealers basically attack a forest to get their drugs back and Cocaine Bear - still high on cocaine, gotta stay true to the franchise - gets gory revenge by brutally gnawing on a range of dirtbags who totally deserve it?

But back to reviewing the movie that exists, where we get a collection of mildly pissed-off characters mostly too boring to mention, played by a number of actors who all deserve better (including Ray Liotta, in what is probably his final on-screen appearance). None of them are given much to work with, in a way that would usually suggest a lot of scenes left on the cutting room floor but here is more likely just thin writing.

Often this feels like an attempt at a bargain basement Coen Brothers film, with a bunch of quirky morally ambivalent characters in over their head (before their heads get torn off). But the dialogue isn't that snappy, the running gags aren't all that funny, and when your movie promises a bear high on cocaine then trying to make a character-based crime comedy is occasionally frustrating. Get back to the bear! 

Then again, no other movie this year promises - then delivers - a bear going nuts while high on cocaine. When you've only got 90 minutes to fill, that's probably enough.

 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Knock at the Cabin

M Night Shyamalan is known for making movies with a twist. But sometimes the twist is that there is no twist: what you see is what you get. Knock at the Cabin (based on a novel by Paul G Tremblay) is one of his films where he plays it straight. The idea may be bizarre, but the rug on the cabin floor remains firmly unpulled.

Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), together with their almost eight year-old daughter Wen (Kristen Wui) are enjoying a getaway at a scenic cabin in the woods when four strangers (David Bautista, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn and Rupert Grint) turn up and demand to be let in. 

They're carrying weird weapons, seem kind of freaked out (aside from Bautista's soft-spoken Leonard) and don't seem willing to clearly articulate what they want beyond ominous suggestions that some tough decisions will have to be made. Those inside the cabin don't want to let them in. Those outside the cabin won't take no for an answer.

Actually, later on they will, because their goal is nothing less than saving the world from the apocalypse - but to do that, the family inside the house will be asked a number of times to make a choice. Either they sacrifice one of their own, or the whole world dies and they get to live alone in the ashes. Each time they say no, the quartet (and the world) will have to pay a price.

This should be a gripping dilemma, part Biblical, part conspiracy nightmare. At times it almost gets there, but the word to stress is "almost". For one, dramatically it doesn't quite hang together: while the end of the world is in theory as big as stakes get, in this movie "the world" is the seven people in the cabin. We see news footage of the outside world, but there's no personal connection to it - or at least, not one we can trust. 

That's largely intentional. We don't know if the quartet's talk of normal lives and families is real, or they're deranged cult members (either way, their end game is extremely self-destructive). But it means the stakes are entirely abstract. It's a mind game, a "what would you do" dilemma for the audience, a film straining to make the kind of conversation starter people drop into conversations at parties seem profound.

The quartet also make it clear that the family's choice has to be their own. They're not going to force them, and they can't kill them - they have to pick and choose the victim themselves. So we know how this is going to progress: at first the family are going to say no because the quartet are clearly crazy, and then the evidence that they're not is going to mount up. 

There's still some tension here, thanks largely to the performances. But outside of a few tight action sequences it's not a lot of tension, because if the four intruders are crazy and the world is safe, then there's no story once they reveal they're not going to kill the family. And if the world isn't safe? Oh wait, we're never given any reason to care about "the world" in the movie. In fact, it'd be a better ending if they did choose to end the world, because at least then we'd get to see some cool devastation.

Shyamalan's movies are traditionally largely plot and concept driven; characters are chess pieces moved around to achieve the desired effect. Here that's actually part of the story, which is a nice twist (aha!), and the increasingly pained performances from the quartet are one of the elements that does work well. The dads, not so much, but that's mostly because their role is to frustrate us: if they say yes right away then there's no story, but while they're saying no they're just dragging things out.

At just over 90 minutes and with the action almost entirely confined to the cabin, this is about as small scale as apocalypses get. It's a fun concept, but Shyamalan usually keeps his humor to a minimum (his cameos at least are always a delight). The result is a silly movie that takes itself a little too seriously, driven by the idea that we'll want the characters to do the right thing rather than the entertaining thing. 

How's that worked out for humanity so far?

- Anthony Morris