Grizzly ‘COCAINE BEAR’ Is Barely Even a Movie

With the aptly titled Cocaine Bear, there is indeed a bear who is on cocaine. If that’s all you’re looking for from a movie like Cocaine Bear – a bear on cocaine who attacks humans – I guess this ought to satisfy those bare minimum requirements. If however you’re looking for things like three-dimensional characters, well-written bits, or even basic movie logic, you’ll find Elizabeth Banks’ film pretty, well, barren.

The film written by Jimmy Warden (The Babysitter: Killer Queen) begins with a black bear truism pulled directly from Wikipedia: black bears are rarely hostile towards humans. But if they are, you have to fight back. Turns out this doesn’t apply when said bear is on a heinous amount of cocaine. The geeked-up bear in question ends up blasted on Colombian marching powder after a drug smuggler tosses massive quantities of the illicit substance over a Georgia national park. Soon-after, a collection of locals, backpackers, cops, hillbillies, EMTs, and organized crime end up in the path of the hopped-up bear. Carnage ensues.

With an impressive ensemble cast that includes Kerri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Ray Liotta, Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Kristofer Hivju and more, Cocaine Bear invests little in fleshing any of its characters out beyond one-dimensional coke bear fodder. They appear, they bumble around, they get eaten by a bear. That’s the plot. That’s not to say that Cocaine Bear really needs to deliver more than that but the problem is that it just is only mediocrely successful at doing the bare minimum. It needed to either fully devote itself to the carnage, chaos, and camp or try to actually bring the characters to life. There are moments where the film rises to its hacky B-movie potential – the highlight involves a desperate escape gone horribly wrong that ends in totally bloody mayhem. The rest of the film, for whatever reason, backs away from the same level of exploitative violence, making for an uneven and inconsistent ride that too often shies away from its greatest features.

Russell’s distraught single mother character (I can’t remember her name, nor is it on IMDb) is the closest thing we have to a true protagonist but even she is written as “distraught single mother” without any further characteristics to make her recognizable as a human with any depth. The performances for the most part though are devoted – or at least more devoted than a movie of this caliber deserve. No one is openly bad, however there’s a weird inside joke to be found somewhere in the casting of a trio of ruffian “teenagers” played by guys who must be in their 30s. I just didn’t get it.

By and large, the comedy is lazy pastiche, mistaking commenting on what’s happening with actual jokes. Expect a dozen or some variations on “Oh my god – that bear is eating cocaine!” This brand of meta “comedy” has become all too commonplace in modern movies and when it becomes the foundation of a film’s joke palette, the appeal rubs off quickly. Once you get beyond the absurd premise, everything that doesn’t involve the coke bear eating people is just an unfunny, half-hearted slog. Spiritually imitating action-comedies like Pineapple Express and 30 Minutes or Less, Cocaine Bear fundamentally fails as a comedy because of this lack of voice and perspective. Yes – this ripped from the headlines is totally worthy of a movie adaptation. This just ain’t it. Moments of extreme physical brutality get a rise from the audience but the dialogue is hacky and weak, failing to elicit any laughs from this disappointed onlooker. Perhaps the movie works better under the influence of its titular substance.

CONCLUSION: Even for a movie called ‘Cocaine Bear’, Elizabeth Banks’ lazy action-comedy is a grizzly comedown. There’s moments where it fulfills the zany B-movie promise of its title but ultimately it’s just too slapdash and loosely assembled to recommend.