Director: Elizabeth Banks
Starring: Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, O’Shea Jackson Jr
Year: 2023
Cocaine Bear is a movie so irreverent and careless in a good way that we almost forgive it its myriad flaws. Especially right now; Oscar-watch season has ended, all the good stuff is out & gone, what’s currently left are jump-scare horror flicks and superhero universe continuations and not much else. Then along comes a bear high on coke and we feel like we might want to head back to the theatre, because why not. Well, it’s not all fun & games, and it’s not all well-made, but at least Cocaine Bear is frivolous, and that’s something we can all use a little of right now.
Based on a true story (kind of), this is the tale of a bear who loved cocaine, and what it would do to get more. Flying an overloaded airplane, a drug smuggler dumps multiple duffel bags of coke into a Georgia forest, but dies in the fall when his parachute doesn’t open. Unfortunately for local hikers, a black bear finds the drugs and becomes quickly addicted, also mauling anyone who comes between it and more hits. A pair of kids playing hooky must survive the bear, while their mom searches for them, the local police hunt for the bags, and criminals try to restore their lost property.
It’s very silly. I mean, very, very silly, a movie about a bear that’s high and enjoys dismembering people while a bunch of other people shoot at each other. It’s almost a horror flick, but too funny and dumb, leaning into the absurdity of the situation more than the horror, and coming out the other side rather light, despite the high death count. My problem, setting aside the entertainment value and fun of the plot itself, was with the production otherwise; the writing, acting, and direction were all high school level, like someone wrote the dialogue & plot in a class and somehow got permission to put it on stage. Elizabeth Banks is a terrible director, Jimmy Warden is an awful writer, and the actors on screen must have known what a joke they were in because their attempts at theatre were laughable. I give this film a lot of credit for simply saying “fuck it” and doing what it wants, it’s at least cool for that, but the quality is so low otherwise it’s hard to wrap my brain around giving it any accolade whatsoever.
My rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆