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Elizabeth Banks has promised her viewers not more than a bear on medication, and a bear on medication is what they get.
Fairly early into Cocaine Bear’s working 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 Eighties Georgia who eats plenty 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 an enormous bear with sharp claws, the mix is kind of distressing for the individuals within the forest round her. However is there one thing deeper happening right here? I questioned because the bear mauled one more sufferer on-screen. Maybe a critique of egocentric Eighties individualism: No amount of cash or costly merchandise can defend you from a coked-up bear! Or possibly it’s an announcement concerning the risks of our trendy world encroaching on nature?
No. Onerous as I attempted, I couldn’t decide on a deeper thesis for Cocaine Bear. It’s 95 minutes of Hollywood storytelling about what would occur if a bear did medication. I’m most likely 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 challenge doesn’t skimp on its predominant attraction, nevertheless it does appear uncertain of what to place round it, throwing a wide range of hapless characters within the combine and arming them largely with detached comedy within the face of some really 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 instances, dropping severed limbs from the sky and strewing loads of intestines on the bottom. And although the persona of the titular bear largely 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 in search of 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 placement (a nationwide park in Georgia) and the identify of the drug runner who brought about the incident, Andrew C. Thornton (performed briefly however with loads of, uh, entrepreneurial power by Matthew Rhys). Every part else is pure fiction.
The movie’s ensemble is kind of giant and spectacular. A dozen or so (largely 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 better his misplaced product. Two plucky 12-year-olds (Christian Convery and Brooklynn Prince) skip faculty to go mountaineering and get tousled 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 primary 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 modifications up the motion as she will be able to, and a very energetic ambulance chase crunches individuals’s bones in sudden 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 person to root for right here; Ehrenreich comes the closest, giving his coke-hunting dirtbag character simply sufficient humanity that you just aren’t immediately hoping for his limbs to be torn off. However the primary occasion is the cocaine bear, and the meager people solely distract from her may.
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