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Ah, expectations. They can, as they say, be a bitch. Cocaine Bear is a movie people have heard about for a long time now after the famous trailer was dropped a couple of months ago to great acclaim. The trailer makes you say I want to see this film right now. I am guilty of pumping up Cocaine Bear big time. How could you not?
I made everyone at work watch the Cocaine Bear trailer during our lunch pic.twitter.com/shfpm81BXC
— Stoner Philly Fan (@StonerPhillyFan) December 3, 2022
If Cocaine Bear were just a trailer, it would go down as an instant cult classic, but how is the film now that it’s finally out? Well, I was meh. It’s not a bad film by any means. Cocaine Bear falls somewhere in between living up to the trailer’s title and being Snakes on a Plane, the Samuel L. Jackson film from 2006 that was equally an internet sensation but ended up being mediocre. Elizabeth Banks tries to give us some character development and even a decent Spielbergian family message (both for the bears and humans) mixed with Sam Raimi-type horror and even a Coen Brothers sense of oddball characters in weird situations. The problem is it’s never as good as those elements despite occasionally being fun.
The 1985 story that loosely inspired Cocaine Bear is, you guessed it, a bear that did cocaine. However, the real-life black bear that ingested the cocaine died almost instantly. He’s on display in Lexington, Kentucky (see picture below). Producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller and writer Jimmy Warden took that general concept and made a fictional movie from there. What would happen if the bear lived and ingested all this cocaine? It’s an intriguing question, and no doubt there’s entertainment to be had from this idea, but it almost seems more appropriate for an SNL Digital Short than a 95-minute movie. I recognize 95 minutes feels like a breeze these days, but even still, Cocaine Bear can’t keep the focus.
There’s an ensemble cast, and a decent amount is happening for a simple Cocaine Bear movie. After we set up the basic premise in 1985, a shipment of cocaine drops out of a plane over Tennessee is then followed by a female American black bear ingesting said cocaine, becoming aggressive, and killing hikers in the process. The cocaine is said to belong to Syd White (Ray Liotta RIP), and he sends his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and friend Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to retrieve it. Eddie is depressed after the recent death of his wife (an oddly dark subject matter to have here). There’s also a lawman played by Isiah Whitlock Jr. (sheeeet) who is on the trail of the cocaine, and he has an odd subplot about caring for a dog that he didn’t order but grows to like. The family portion of the film involves Keri Russell playing a single mother nurse who cares for a daughter Dee Dee currently upset at her mother for canceling plans to have them both hang out with her new boyfriend. She skips school with a friend Henry, and they find the cocaine. Henry ingests some himself. Finally, there’s Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale), who has a crush on Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), and they go venturing into the woods with Keri Russell to find the kids.
I was pleasantly surprised the filmmakers took the time to try and make this a “real movie” with some character development, but also it’s sadly tame. We begin with the bear itself, which is done in absolutely shoddy CGI by Wētā FX, which is a shame because it takes any threatening element the bear has out of the movie. I understand there’s stuff with CGI that makes some of the killings more creative cinematically than with using a live bear, and I’m not asking for James Cameron’s detail to the proceedings, but the bear looks fake, and that’s a problem.
I guess it’s a problem of expectation because this film promised, based on the trailers, to transcend shock value, and it’s just not quite crazy enough. There are some laugh-out-loud moments and one sequence of terror that’s well done, but I also feel the movie pulls many punches. The comedy is based around stuff like kids doing cocaine and extreme violence. It’s gleefully self-aware of the violence, but that’s all the film has up its sleeve creatively. There’s nothing genuinely unnerving or unhinging, or memorable. Cocaine Bear is a decent time at the moment, and it’s better than Snakes on a Plane, but I doubt it will be a cult classic in the future.
** out of ****
