Elizabeth Banks has promised her viewers not more than a bear on medication, and a bear on medication is what they get.
Pretty early into Cocaine Bear’s operating time, I began looking out desperately for the metaphor. Elizabeth Banks’s action-comedy-horror is, as you may need heard, a few black bear in Nineteen Eighties Georgia who eats a number of cocaine that fell out of an airplane. The cocaine makes her offended and hungry for extra cocaine, and on condition that she’s already a giant bear with sharp claws, the mixture is sort of distressing for the individuals within the forest round her. But is there one thing deeper occurring right here? I puzzled because the bear mauled yet one more sufferer on-screen. Perhaps a critique of egocentric Nineteen Eighties individualism: No sum of money or costly merchandise can shield you from a coked-up bear! Or perhaps it’s a press release concerning the risks of our fashionable world encroaching on nature?
No. Hard as I attempted, I couldn’t choose a deeper thesis for Cocaine Bear. It is 95 minutes of Hollywood storytelling about what would occur if a bear did medication. I’m in all probability the idiot for making an attempt to summon some profundity from these bloodstained reels; Banks has promised her viewers not more than a cocaine bear, and a cocaine bear is what they get, all growly and crazed and rendered with very expensive-looking CGI. This venture doesn’t skimp on its fundamental attraction, but it surely does appear not sure of what to place round it, throwing a wide range of hapless characters within the combine and arming them principally with detached comedy within the face of some actually gnarly violence.
If blockbuster-level gore is what you’re after, Cocaine Bear delivers—I used to be impressed with how gleefully gross Banks will get at occasions, dropping severed limbs from the sky and strewing loads of intestines on the bottom. And although the character of the titular bear principally manifests as aggravated grunting and mighty roars, she’s a strong visual-effects creation, obvious at each human with the beady-eyed depth of somebody searching for her subsequent repair.
The true story of the cocaine bear is comparatively mundane—after drug smugglers dropped their newest cargo from Colombia within the woods, a useless black bear was discovered with some 75 kilos of cocaine in its system, and was ultimately stuffed and mounted. What that poor creature did earlier than keeling over is a thriller, however Jimmy Warden’s script imagines a bacchanal of carnage round that occasion, retaining solely the situation (a nationwide park in Georgia) and the title of the drug runner who precipitated the incident, Andrew C. Thornton (performed briefly however with loads of, uh, entrepreneurial power by Matthew Rhys). Everything else is pure fiction.
The movie’s ensemble is sort of massive and spectacular. A dozen or so (principally unwitting) characters come throughout the ursine terror within the woods. There’s the drug lord Syd Dentwood (the late, nice Ray Liotta), who bids his bedraggled son, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), and underling Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to get well his misplaced product. Two plucky 12-year-olds (Christian Convery and Brooklynn Prince) skip faculty to go mountaineering and get snarled within the chaos, as do their apprehensive mother (Keri Russell), a salty park ranger (Margo Martindale), a self-satisfied environmentalist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), and a dogged detective (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.).
This Robert Altman–esque assemblage of expertise largely goes to waste, as a result of just about everyone seems to be required to behave out the identical fundamental sequence of occasions. It goes like this: Character friends over the horizon, spots a furry beast approaching, and realizes one thing’s amiss. Wait, is {that a} bear? Is one thing up with the bear? Wait, is that cocaine on the bear’s nostril? Wait, is that bear about to eat us? Repeat advert nauseam, with slight variations in dialogue however the identical ensuing cacophony of screams and flying viscera. Banks adjustments up the motion as she will be able to, and a very energetic ambulance chase crunches individuals’s bones in surprising methods. As one of many 12-year-olds yells fairly concisely, “It’s fucked!”
Cocaine Bear may’ve been a triumph if the jokes landed, however the zingers simply aren’t as much as the mayhem. And although the character actors are all able to sterling work, there’s no one to root for right here; Ehrenreich comes the closest, giving his coke-hunting dirtbag character simply sufficient humanity that you simply aren’t immediately hoping for his limbs to be torn off. But the primary occasion is the cocaine bear, and the meager people solely distract from her may.