Cocaine Bear

When you have a movie called “Cocaine Bear”, you expect nothing less than a bear on a drug-induced rampage. You get what you pay for and nothing else. This is a movie that knows it’s ridiculous and sadly doesn’t lean into it enough. Though, you can’t deny that everyone in this film enjoys himself (or herself) with the premise.

Based on a true story (and I do mean “based”), this tells the story of a man who dumped a lot of cocaine in the Chattahoochie National Forest. A bear gets into it, and all hell breaks loose. It weaves three different subplots: a mother looking for her lost daughter (Keri Russell), two drug dealers looking for the lost stash (O’Shea Jackson, Jr. And Ehrlen Emmerich), and a cop looking to capture the drug dealers (Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.)

None of the characters are really deep. Emmerich, the son of a drug kingpin (the late Ray Liotta in his final role), grieves the death of his wife. Keri Russell wants her child back. Jackson loves his clothes and shoes. No one here is someone you feel too sorry for, but that’s passable with a movie like this. No one watches a slasher or a monster movie to sympathize with the characters too much.

Jackson and Russell make the most with their characters, and seeing Jesse Tyler Ferguson playing a Southern forester was surprisingly entertaining. Probably because you get Mitchell Pritchett with a Southern accent (not a bad thing). The bear was also a decent albeit cheap effect. You know it’s a CGI bear, but it’s a beautiful, emotive beast that gets into mode.

While everyone has fun with this ridiculous premise, and there’s plenty of blood and gore to go around, the movie doesn’t really go into much of the silliness as it should. The deaths don’t seem too over the top or hilarious. Only a handful of moments had me really laughing. It’s a movie that wants to be a cult film but doesn’t quite understand what makes a cult film. You would think that someone like Elizabeth Banks with her comedic background would know how to bring more comedy into this premise.

Fortunately, this flaw isn’t enough for me to say, “don’t watch this film”. It’s fun enough and ridiculous enough to warrant all the jokes. I can’t say that you’ll be bored because you won’t. There’s enough in this movie to elevate it from the same fate as “Snakes on a Plane”: it’s not a joke forcing itself to be a thing. Just remember that you get what you pay for and little else.