For months, the publicity buildup for Elizabeth Banks’ horror-comedy Cocaine Bear has convincingly sold it as deliriously entertaining nonsense. The movie’s hilarious, unrepentantly trashy trailer boldly spelled the plot out: A hulking black bear high on cocaine rampages through the Georgia hills. Sadly, the film is a missed opportunity that doesn’t deliver on its very appealing hype.
The story opens in 1985 as drug smuggler Andrew C. Thornton (Matthew Rhys) flings duffel bags full of cocaine from his auto-piloted plane into a Georgia forest. With the plane in trouble from its heavy load, Thornton attempts to parachute out and plummets to his death. A bear stumbles onto the drugs, ingests huge quantities, and develops a Tony Montana-level coke habit. Alternating between bizarre and violent behavior, the bear attacks nearly everyone it encounters. A series of interwoven subplots involving the drugs and the bear ensue, including Detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) investigating Thornton’s fumbled drug run; Thornton’s accomplice, Syd (the late Ray Liotta), hunting for the cocaine; and schoolkids Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Henry (Christian Convery) cutting school unwittingly close to the bear.
Probably the film’s funniest element is how it intentionally mocks its own declaration of “inspired by true events” which, even in serious current movies, is frequently double-talk that conceals a disregard for historical facts. The real cocaine bear reportedly never assaulted anyone and was simply found dead after OD-ing on the air-dropped cocaine. From there, Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden largely invented their story.
Cocaine Bear is distantly related to nature-in-revolt films like Grizzly and Day of the Animals—both of those films are better made and more entertaining—and the Italian Wild Beasts, about murderous zoo animals juiced up on PCP. What made drive-in movies like those so appealing was the lack of irony that gave their many ludicrous moments a manic unpredictability and wonderful ridiculousness.
In a perfect world, Cocaine Bear would have been made in 1987 by a sleazy outfit like Cannon Films for about $1 million, played totally straight-faced, and starred a stuntman in a moth-eaten bear suit snorting lines off a Fat Boys LP cover. But Banks’ approach is annoyingly tongue-in-cheek, and her heavy-handed self-awareness spoils what could have been highly entertaining cinematic mayhem.
There aren’t many noteworthy performances, mainly because most of the characters are caricatures, especially the various grotesque Southerners. The audience has so little time to get acquainted with anyone on screen that the occasional bloody dismemberment hardly registers. Whitlock’s quietly funny detective is an exception, as are child actors Prince and Convery as the precocious youngsters.
The prodigiously talented Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh has composed a surprisingly generic ’80s throwback score, and the bear and its attacks are generally pretty unconvincing—largely visual effects built around a motion-capture actor playing the beast.
When a movie works overtime to be as dumb as Cocaine Bear, it becomes almost critic-proof: When you pick it apart, the filmmakers can always say they meant it to be lousy. Deliberate amateurism like this usually goes awry fast, and such is the case here. If you want to be wildly entertained by gory, unhinged junk, let this slick Hollywood imitation hibernate and seek out the genuine, untamed variety elsewhere in the film vaults of the wild.
Cocaine Bear
R, 95 minutes
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema,
Violet Crown Cinema
