1 star
In 1985, a 275-pound black bear died of a drug overdose in Georgia after ingesting massive amounts of cocaine. The drugs had been tossed from a plane by a smuggler whose body was later found in the backyard of a house in Knoxville, Tenn. The crashed airplane was located in North Carolina.
As Jack Webb used to say in Dragnet, those are the facts: Just enough for a three-line story in a UPI press blurb. For director Elizabeth Banks, however, it was also enough of a weird story to build a movie around. Thirty-eight years later, Cocaine Bear hit the silver screen.
But maybe it shouldn’t have.
While there are probably a lot of movies that started with less original material than Cocaine Bear, the filmmakers must begin with a clear idea of what kind of movie they want to make. And since a straight documentary seemed out of the question, Banks and her co-creators had to decide if their Cocaine Bear was going to be a wacky horror/comedy, like director Anthony C. Ferrante did with sharks in the Sharknado series or a straight-up horror/thriller like The Edge (1977) or Grizzly (1976). Watching the final film, they never decided because Cocaine Bear isn’t funny, and it isn’t scary.
Part of the problem is the star of the film. Not Keri Russell or Alden Ehrenreich or O’Shea Jackson Jr, but the bear. Great bears have been on the big screen over the past few years, like the giant bear that tried to eat Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant (2015). We know that bear is not real, but watching him throw Leo around like a broken doll is terrifying. The bear in Cocaine Bear never even approaches that level of reality; it looks fake, and that fakeness ruins whatever thrills Banks tries to build in the movie.
The gore in Cocaine Bear is just as fake. It takes more than throwing a fake leg stump into the scene to make the audience jump these days, and it doesn’t help if it looks like you are using the same phony leg stump in more than one scene. The film has an R rating, so why not up the ante regarding blood and guts? Don’t just imply the bear is eating Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s character in a tree. Show it. Anyone paying to watch Cocaine Bear is the perfect audience for that level of blood-soaked comedy.
While they stumble on trying to make the bear work in the movie, the filmmakers fall flat on their faces regarding the human characters in Cocaine Bear. There are too many of them for the thin script to support, leaving the audience confused about who to root for as the movie progresses. Do we care about the kids who find and try the cocaine? Their concerned mom? Do we root for the drug dealers trying to recover the drugs? What about the police detective trying to capture the drug dealer or the park ranger who is trying to keep nature safe? Some of them can immediately be earmarked as bear food, which is fine, but far too make hang around far too long without being interesting. Watching them die feels like an afterthought,
