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Cocaine Bear is a Manufactured B-Movie, Irreverently Silly if Insincere


Well, I don’t know what I expected…
Believe it or not there is a true story attached (though incredibly loosely) to Cocaine Bear, an extremely silly comedy-horror film directed by Elizabeth Banks that is attempting to be a reverse engineered B-movie classic. In 1985, a drug smuggler flying over Tennessee unloaded a duffle bag of cocaine to lighten his load before jumping out himself and dying. The bag landed in a forest where a black bear got into it and overdosed, turning up dead in Georgia a few months later. It has since been stuffed and put on display in a mall in Lexington because America is weird that way. And a sure sign of that continued weirdness is the fact that someone -specifically screenwriter Jimmy Warden- looked at that story and decided to turn it into a gory monster movie populated with characters you might find in a B-tier Coen Brothers film. Sure, I’ll grant it the novelty.
Cocaine Bear is designed to appeal off of that weird factor -the outrageousness of its premise is enough to turn anyone’s ear. And it maintains exactly the irreverent smarmy tone you would expect from that title, as though daring the audience to gawk at the ludicrousness it willfully puts on screen in service of a killer cocaine-addicted bear -the real thing it should surprise no one left no body count. But as much as it asks you to treat it like some giant joke whilst carrying itself as impervious to criticism, there is creativity there and genuine entertainment amidst the shock value. At the same time not nearly enough of it to make it the special kind of trash it clearly aspires towards. It’s much too polished, much too deliberate, and not honestly all that spontaneous.
I’ll give it this though, the Cocaine Bear is one of the less distractingly-obvious of Hollywood’s recent trend of CGI animals over the real thing, and here it makes a lot more sense to look kinda fake. This bear is introduced promptly getting into the dropped coke and moments later brutally mauling a pair of Norwegian hikers -clawing (or biting) off an entire leg for a sense of the kind of corny violence the movie will offer in spades. Simultaneously, the movie follows several disparate characters in and around the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest who will come into contact with the bear. First there is Sari (Keri Russell) a nurse going after her school-skipping daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friend Henry (Christian Convery). There’s the local Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale), and her sidekick Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), as well as a gang of miscreant teenagers constantly troubling them. Arriving from Knoxville, where the body of  the drug smuggler was found is a police officer Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.); and coming in from St. Louis to retrieve the cocaine is mob fixer Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and the depressed Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), the disgraced son of the crime boss Syd (the late Ray Liotta -in one of his final performances).
This eclectic cast, several of whom are delivering truly wild performances, is one of the movie’s strong suits. It would be easy to approach the movie without much regard for the people who come up against the Cocaine Bear –make them simple archetypes or (in the slasher tradition) hollow vessels of misunderstood satire. But this movie cultivates its cannon-fodder more smartly. And to be clear, these characters are anything but complex; however, what they’ve got are a series of well-thought out and articulated eccentricities, written with a self-conscious sharpness that corresponds with the strengths of their performers. And so you’ve got high-strung Ferguson, manic Liotta, comically apathetic Ehrenreich –all interacting with a bear perpetually high on cocaine. Even the kids, often the most boring in these narrative contexts, are weird little gremlins who at one point eat a spoonful of cocaine each to prove some kind of fictional street cred. The best of the bunch is Martindale, whose excess crusty attitude and general bitterness towards life hits the perfect note of raw cartoon that this movie’s tone aspires to.
And yet it really does just aspire towards that perfect silliness, it never quite hits the mark. For as inventive and outrageous as the movie can be it still is a bit too formal for a movie called Cocaine Bear. It bothers to have a couple actual arcs –not particularly well done- and to evoke occasional moments of emotion… in a movie where a bear and her cubs become cokeheads and fight gangsters. Banks is a good director but she’s too much of a Hollywood type to skirt convention too much with regards to narrative or technique, and it can be felt in this movie, especially by the highly typical third act. Much as it wants to look like an underground B-movie it can’t bring itself to lose the metaphorical bells and whistles that mark its highly calculated craft and layout.
Where Banks most tries to disguise this is through dumb and crazy violence, which in execution can get pretty fun and creative. Possessed of hyperactive strength and aggression, the Cocaine Bear is capable of various dismemberments, disembowelments, and critical injuries of all kinds. It bites through the legs of a guy in a tree, claws off someone’s hand, tears out someone’s intestines that it shares with its cubs. But it’s not just the bear responsible for the carnage –someone gets shot through the head, three are beaten to a pulp in a public restroom, and an ambulance stretcher becomes a deadly trap. Credit to the ingenuity and the humour on a lot of this, even if it does sometimes feel like posturing. Certainly it fares more interestingly than the other element of pure shock value –the cocaine- which quickly loses all lustre once it becomes essentially the bear’s equivalent of Popeye’s spinach.
As sharp as some sequences and characters are, the script isn’t without glaring issues. The further it gets in the less interested it is by its ensemble of characters, killing off one in a particularly lame way, another off-screen in a death that is awkwardly referenced in flashback, and a third character just disappears from the plot entirely. Additionally, there are times when the dialogue is clearly stretching itself to seem clever, especially in some of the later bits with Henry, who takes on the role of the smart aleck audience avatar. There are sure signs here of a novice screenwriter and some fairly sloppy editing.
But the movie is what it is. A Cocaine Bear that is not the best version of itself, but is still a passably entertaining tribute to schlock with some decent creativity and characterization behind it. Banks and her cast have fun with the assignment in a way that translates, and I will say if it is Liotta’s last big-screen outing he gets a pretty fitting send-off for his career. There’s no way this movie becomes any kind of midnight screening staple like it wants to be -it’s oddly too normal- but it is charming enough for a curious distraction at least.

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