Cocaine Bear - Movie Review

Critics Score - 6 of 10

General Audience Score - 7 of 10

I’ve seen a lot of quote unquote “dumb” movies in my time and I use the term dumb very loosely. But needless to say, there are some dumb movies that are really truly ingenious, from Airplane to Dumb And Dumber to Borat, some of the perceived ignorance on display is actually highly thought out and intelligent. There’s plenty of moments of subjectively “pure stupidity” in cinema that are also some of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen. Sometimes the dumbest things can be pure comedic genius. A new movie just released a couple weeks ago that’s title alone shouts “dumb fun”, and you can’t help but snicker at the goofy aesthetics of the poster and the tag line that tells you exactly what you’re in for, “Get In Line”. We get Cocaine Bear from director Elizabeth Banks, whose humorous directing sensibilities make for a decently enjoyable time with this latest effort. Fortunately there’s more fun here than dumb, but it’s not a landslide victory for fun, and it helps that this movie knows exactly that that’s what it wants to be. This is plain and simple, turn your brain off and watch some people getting mauled by an animal that’s high as a kite. There’s a good time to be had for those that have an affinity for Bears and also possibly for Cocaine, although not necessarily in that order.

SYNOPSIS - In the infamous words of the great Rick James, “Cocaine’s a hell of a drug!”. The opening theme music kick on with Jefferson Starship’s Jane’s guitar riffs cranking through the speakers, a curious song choice that indicates not only the 80’s timeframe our film is set in, but also possibly references Elizabeth Bank’s movie from last year Call Jane.??? We then see a shot of a man flying in the back of a plane at night, the cargo bay door tears open and a man starts throwing red duffel bags out while dancing and karate chopping like he’s in training for a Kung-Fu movie. But as he prepares to jump, he straps on his parachute, slips on a pair of aviator sunglasses and as he throws himself out, smacks his head on the door overhead and collapses before falling out. Some text appears on the screen and tells us that what we’re about to see is based on actual events that took place in Georgia, 1985. I love a good down to earth movie. We then read some quotes of information about bears and their motivations for attacking humans, right before the source of the quotes appears below it, “Wikipedia”. Oh, good. We then catch up with a married couple, Olaf (Kristofer Hivju) and Elsa (Hannah Hoekstra) tee hee, as they go for a hike in the Georgia state wilderness, when they happen to spot a black bear. They take some pictures before the bear spots them and proceeds to chase the backpacking pair, for the sake of audience amusement, let’s just say it doesn’t end well for these two.

After we see a few 1980’s anti-drug ads, we’re moving forward into the “story”, police are investigating the death of the plane jumper, who happened to drop right into a neighborhood, again the statistical odds of this aren’t worth contemplating. The main detective investigating the case of the dead drug dealer is Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), he’s been on the tail of a notorious drug lord Syd, (played by the late Ray Liotta). We then catch up with Syd as he dispatches a couple of his guys to try and find the drugs, lost in the Georgia wilderness. We then get to meet the main protagonist, no it’s not the bear, a nurse Sari (Keri Russell) is heading off to work and leaving her teenage daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) while she’s at the hospital. The following day Dee Dee and her friend Henry (Christian Convrey) set off into the woods in search of a waterfall Dee Dee was supposed to paint with her mother, thus we’re given some characters that’ll be in harm’s way that we can hope survive the bears murderous clutches. None of these characters are terribly well written, although objectively, anybody going into a film called Cocaine Bear with high expectations for the writing, well, that’s on them. Once everyone is in the woods, the killing can commence, the bear is played up almost like a monster in a 1980’s horror film at times, a five-hundred pound animal whizzing behind it’s potential victims and dragging them into the bushes without being seen. Ridiculous? Yes. Amusing? For the most part. The plot treads water through to the finale, most everything is predictable, the ending expected.

The screenplay is perfectly adequate for generating some humor and maintaining a decent amount of entertainment but I mostly associate the amount of relative success the film enjoys to the direction from Elizabeth Banks. Banks, while not tapping into some of the satire and humor that can really get me personally rolling, she has a knack for and lightly flirts with humorous situations and characters. The film effectively alternates the humor with the violence, the bear’s brutal killing and mauling of everything in its path. This combination worked decently well, even if not all the humor it threw at the wall stuck for me. The digital effects were decent, but I won’t say the were great even very good. I found the bear’s fur was undefined and glossy, being from Michigan, I’ve seen black bears in person more than once and instead of being shiny, I’d describe their fur as more muted and dull, sometimes even looking almost brown. Wisely the runtime doesn’t wear out it’s welcome, it comes in at just over an hour and a half, there’s only so much of this material an audience could handle before they’d start to turn on a film like this. The uptempo score is almost like mixture of a heavy metal rock anthems mixed with some horror elements, which makes for a curious listening experience. In all the Cocaine Bear is no triumph of cinema, in most of the ways a film could be considered one, but it does have enough going for it to leave viewers satisfied. If this movie was a carnival ride, it’d be like a Matterhorn or the swing carousel ride, it’ll blow your hair back a bit but it won’t be anything you write home about.

SUMMARY - Sometimes we need a reminder that not all films have to challenge us intellectually or make us contemplate the meaning of life or our own existence. This may not be some kind of masterpiece of writing or directing, but a woodland creature on drugs might just be the romp through the forest you needed with this Cocaine Bear.