Cocaine Bear is a gorry comedy about the apex predator high on cocaine that terrorizes a small town. My wife and I just saw the movie at AMC and as an AMC A-list member, I was surprised that they were giving away free gummy bears. Unfortunately, this was one of the highlights of the movie-going experience. Cocaine Bear is a rated R comedy about drug
traffickers trying to get back pounds of cocaine that went missing during transport. The shipment gets dumped off into a National Park and a black bear got into it and then goes nuts. Directed by Elizabeth Banks who I love as a director and an actress but more as an actress than the director I'm sorry to say. Starring Keri Russell, Ray Liotta, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Alden Ehrenreich, and is written by Jimmy Warden.
Usually, I find myself in a situation where I'm saying "that movie was so great I don't know
why it went straight to streaming, it should have gone to theaters". Cocaine Bear gave me the opposite feeling. This felt like a Netflix movie that was taking a chance in theaters. The writer, Jimmy Warden has experience writing movies that were Netflix movies like The Babysitters, another comedy horror. When I read that, I was like, wow that that made a lot of sense. His writing style is perfect for like streaming and TV but it wasn't that strong how for a theatrical release.
There were certain characters who were very funny at certain times, that's the problem. There were only a few characters who were consistently entertaining from the first moment you see them all the way to the end. those two characters were solid and entertaining
throughout were child actors Christian Convery (Henry) & Aaron Holliday (Stash).
Another problem with this film was the use of today's slang in a film set in the 1980s. This movie was disjointed and you can't really make a bad script good. You can do the best with what you got and that was basically what we felt like we were dealing with. A movie that was poorly written. and it felt like the director (Banks) was doing their best with her comedy background to pull out the best performance that she can get out of everybody. It wasn't good enough. There was just funny stuff thrown together juggling two genres.
The thing that I loved about this movie was the fact that it would transition from horror, like Jaws, to the bear becoming like the Popeye cartoon character where the hero needs her spinach (in this case cocaine) to overtake the threats. This was a decent plot device but the execution was lacking. with the budget that was had, the CGI of the bear was pretty good and realistic with the action and the kills. The reactions to this bear were funny and they did a great job with the fun factor overall. This film just depended on the bear scenes and there weren't enough of them. I think if this was a film about a town coming together to hunt down a cocaine-fueled bear while simultaneously criminals secretly blend in to collect the cocaine before the police catch wind would have been a funnier story.
Though this film was based on true events nothing we see in the movie actually happened the way it is depicted on the screen. Reports show that the bear just died of an overdose.