Movie Review: Cocaine Bear
Cocaine Bear, and its confreres (Snakes on a Plane, Sharknado, etc.) are essentially review-proof. Does this film have a bear in it? Yes. Is the bear on cocaine? Yes. Then we’re halfway there. With that comes the caveat that, if you do fail to deliver on the singular promise of a ridiculous title like those above, you become interminable.
Luckily, Cocaine Bear does deliver just enough outlandishness to cover the price of admission and nudges itself a smidge above the pack with the help of a solid cast of mildly eccentric bear-chow. There are the naïve tourists just out for a hike in the pristine American wilderness, the bickering low-level gangsters sent to retrieve the missing product (one among them inconsolable after the death of his wife, but he stills tags along since he’s the boss’ son), the flirtatious park ranger and clueless animal rights activist, the gang of moronic teenage delinquents, a duo of out-of-their-depth local law enforcement, and a concerned mom running after a pair of kids, who stumble upon and then (in a sort of proto-cinnamon-challenge) heap knife loads of white powder into their mouths like sherbet.
That cast, incidentally, is comprised mostly of beloved character-actors; Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Isiah Whitlock Jr., the inimitable Margo Martindale, Matthew Rhys and the late great Ray Liotta, who is unfortunately relegated to the least interesting part in the film, and a relatively minor one at that. This is a consequence of the Liotta character’s (a grizzled crime boss) relative dissociation from the antics of the plot proper; that being what is this bear going to do next?
For the bear is, of course, the star here. A problem with having a great idea and stretching it out into a full movie (even one as economical in its runtime as this), is that the fun of the premise can wear thin. How many times can you be surprised, horrified or delighted by a coked-up bear chowing down on a peripheral character? Luckily, director Elizabeth Banks and writer Jimmy Warden have rendered the bear an agent of chaos, and its prey a gaggle of incompetent, reckless human dodo-birds. The bear won’t simply devour you, occasionally it’ll get playful, or fall asleep atop you, or inadvertently cause a car to crash, or do nothing much at all, leaving the humans to cause calamity in their attempts to handle the situation. A non-zero number of characters are taken out by each other, with minimal assistance from the bear.
It’s very silly stuff, though not as ‘insane’ as a movie titled Cocaine Bear has the right to be, and it’s pretty gruesome at times, even if these moments are still framed comically, but the rest of the film’s foundation is slight. It’s professional work; the stream of chuckles is steady (probably not as strong outside the collectivised good humour of the theatre), every character is given their suitable stock motivations and quirks, and there is essentially nothing that’s outright bad in the film, but that means the grunt-work of all earnestness and plot amounts to nothing more or less than waiting for the bear to come back, or at the very least for something to once again go catastrophically wrong.
It’s mediocre but where else are you going to see a bear absolutely vacuum back a rail of blow spread perfectly across the detached leg of a once happy hiker? Cocaine Bear 2, maybe?
