'Cocaine Bear' Is A Near Perfect B- Movie
Audaciously hilarious, Cocaine Bear delivers on its premise featuring mayhem galore with a cast that provides the laughs. Based on a true story, Cocaine Bear places its setting in 1985 Knoxville Tennessee, where bags full of an outrageous amount of cocaine is airdropped. The stash lands in the presence of an enormously hungry grizzly bear with a taste for cocaine. In real life, the bear ate the coke and then died from a heart attack. But fiction is often more fun than fact.
Cocaine acts as fuel for the 700-pound bear who rips and tears his way across the forest like a sports car. Having a bear run around for an hour and a half isn't just enough for the film to warrant a viewing time. You need a cast of characters who can keep the story flowing. The trick to directing a good movie is making your human characters in a film marketed towards its animal co-star work, so the audience isn't marking time for the bear to come in. To the film's fortune, the characters play their appropriate B-movie roles to a tee.
Each actor fills their role appropriately as either someone you want to see live or die. The film has a wide cast of characters with branching storylines that seamlessly blend where one story isn't more boring than the other. There's the mom Sari (Keri Russell), who's in pursuit of her missing daughter Dee Dee (Brooklyn Prince), that ventured into the Tennessee forest preserve with her friend Henry (Christian Convery) when ditching school. Next in the lineup is the drug dealers searching for their lost stash in the forest.
The late Ray Liotta plays Syd, an old drug hustler whose a terrible father to his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich). Eddie is a man who wants nothing to do with his sleezebag father's business. Instead, he chooses to drown his sorrows over his later partner. Sitting in bars won't be enough to keep Eddie from venturing after the coke, as Syd has sent his top dealer and henchman, Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr.), to ensure his son gets the drugs.
Syd's actions haven't gone unnoticed. Knoxville Detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) has been following Syd's actions for years. The lost stash of coke is his closest lead yet to bagging the longtime criminal. Lastly, there's Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale). Lize doesn't have much to do in her life when working in the quiet Georgia preserve. Having a heavyweight, coked-out grizzly bear is sure to spice things up a bit.
With all the interconnecting plots, the film risks being boring or disorganized. Like many horror films, you don't want the audience to wait for the killer to show up for entertainment. The cast has enough to play with to render the time not spent without the bear worthy of a watch. Each character has a scene to shine with their hero moments or glorious demise. Syd is a deplorable human being, and Liz is likable but can be annoying (as the film's intention). Eddie and Daveed are characters you root for despite their drug-dealing background. Dee and Henry don't just play cute kids. They swear and act as most curious middle schoolers do. One of the movie's best scenes, if not my favorite, involves Dee and Henry doing something that would spoil the fun if I told you. Suffice it to say; people aren't going to the film to watch humans interact; they're there to see some grizzly mayhem.
The kills in Cocaine Bear are plentiful enough to feed the audience's depraved appetite. From the opening moments, the crowd was "oh-ing!" and "ah-ing!" with each slain victim. Director Elizabeth Banks times her murder scenes with enough tension to warrant some fun jump scares. The blood seems like it might be limited at first, where characters are pulled off-screen to be butchered. Thankfully as the film progresses, we learn it was only because Ms. Banks is saving the gorier murders further down the narrative's road. When the audience gets the glory kills they paid for, they're a fun sight to witness. Some of the best kills, if not the best, aren't even done by the drug addict furry.
One element that doesn't work in Cocaine Bear is the bear itself. A CGI bear is used for obvious reasons, but its fully lit final render looks more like a bear from Red Dead Redemption than a live-action threat. Luckily for this film, it's made as a B movie where the bear doesn't have to look entirely realistic. The film looks low budget but not cheap enough that it appears lazy. The fun of seeing Cocaine Bear is the cheesy element of its overall premise. In the title alone, Elizabeth Banks tells the audience upfront not to take anything seriously.
If there's one element of Cocaine Bear that has subliminal messaging, it's to leave nature alone. Animals should be left in their natural habitat. When people poke their noses into their territory, they invade their privacy. It's like if a total stranger started walking around your house. How would you like it if that happened? With enough fun and energy placed in its laughs, thrills, and kills, Cocaine Bear is a B movie blast that should be seen with friends at a packed audience.
