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
Dude this ain't the Godfather, hello
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