Cocaine Bear, 2023.
Directed by Elizabeth Banks.
Starring Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Ray Liotta, Christian Convery, Margo Martindale, Brooklynn Prince, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Isiah Whitlock Jr.
SYNOPSIS:
A bear goes on the rampage after finding a stash of cocaine that a drug kingpin threw from a plane.
You may think that Cocaine Bear is the start of ‘a thing’, where a series of movies featuring animals going on a rampage whilst under the influence of something that affects their behaviour will flood the market, but cast your minds back – if you can; if you can’t then just imagine it – to the 1970s and a post-Jaws world, where every wild animal you can think of got their own movie, including a bear.
That movie was Grizzly, and along with the likes of Piranha, Squirm, Empire of the Ants, Alligator and Day of the Animals (where an enraged and topless Leslie Nielsen wrestles a bear during a thunderstorm – no, really!) formed a movement of ‘nature run amok’ movies, each successive one being of a lower quality than the last, culminating in the roaring, performing rubber shark of Jaws: The Revenge in 1987. And whilst the deliberately (so they say) bad run of CGI hybrid creature features that SyFy and The Asylum brought to the public’s attention in the 2000s continues to this day, the novelty factor that made them famous has become somewhat nauseating.
All of which means that Cocaine Bear has to work pretty hard to do something that we haven’t seen before, and although we’ve seen animals affected by pesticides, microwaves, laser beams from space and bits of meteors that have dropped in the sea, we haven’t actually seen a wild beast go mad on narcotics. And to a point, we still haven’t because this is 2023 and filmmakers are not going to give actual cocaine to an actual bear (although had this been made in the 1970s by, say, John Milius or Werner Herzog then that is probably what would have happened).
Set in 1985 and based on a true story, Cocaine Bear begins with a drug kingpin throwing sports bags full of cocaine from an aircraft, with the aim of doing a deal with gangster Syd White (Ray Liotta, in one of his final roles) once he has leapt from the plane and opened his parachute. Unfortunately for him, his exit goes a bit wrong when he leaps and bags his head, sending him careering to the ground at a rapid pace and not being able to collect his drugs.
However, a bear at the Blood Mountain country park does find it, has a toot and goes for a wander, coming across a hippie couple planning their wedding and whose plans drastically change once the buzzing bear has its way, and then we get to meet our main characters, some of whom are obviously set up as a meal for the bear with the munchies, but the core consists of Sari (Keri Russell), who has gone looking for her young daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her pal Henry (Christian Convery) as they have bunked off school, sharp-shooting park ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) and outside survival expert Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), cop Bob Springs (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who is out there looking for the missing drugs after investigating the death of the drug dealer, and Syd White who, along with his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and goon Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), is also looking for the drugs.
And much hilarity ensues as the fairly serious combination of a worried mother looking for her missing children, an angry drug dealer looking for his stash and a dogged detective hoping to make an arrest clashes head-on with the idea of a huge wild bear off its nut on cocaine. There are plenty of laughs as the bear rips limbs from torsos, young children find a bag of coke, identify it as cocaine and instantly sample it to see what happens, and Daveed and Eddie take a very emotional hostage to lead them to where the drugs are, but despite the movie being enjoyable, superbly shot and the CGI bear not as off-putting as it could have been, there is the feeling that it doesn’t quite go far enough.
Not that the kills aren’t fun because they are, the combination of practical gags and CGI enhancement working well (two words – ambulance chase!), but just when the movie is about to make the leap from silly fun to totally mental it seems to step back and move onto something else. There are a lot of characters and plot threads that need to come together in the one central location where the bear is so maybe it was a time issue to get everything in – at 95 minutes, a movie like this does not need to be any longer – and as the central premise revolves around cocaine the filmmakers have to get the anti-drugs message in during the final act, but despite this Cocaine Bear never quite feels comfortable with its own premise, like it doesn’t know whether to keep things on the (relatively) sensible side of things – after all, it is based on a true story – or embrace its absurdities and go for it.
Despite the contrived final act, Cocaine Bear is still a blast as it wastes no time getting started, the characters are all fun and the actors involved seem to pitch their performances just right, and the camerawork is superb, making this a very good-looking creature feature. For a bit of late-night monster madness it certainly ticks the boxes, and it makes overly-stylised studio B-movies like Snakes on a Plane look like the desperate-to-be-loved efforts that they are, but you can’t help thinking that they could have gone a bit further. Don’t worry, though, as by the time Cocaine Bear comes out you can be sure that The Asylum have already planned at least half-a-dozen knock-offs, all of which will no doubt make this movie look like a masterpiece.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
Cocaine Bear is available now on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD and Digital Download.
Originally published May 29, 2023. Updated May 31, 2023.
