The only thing anyone needs to know about Cocaine Bear is its title. Anyone who is sold on that two-word pitch will have some fun laughing along with the theater audience. Anyone who thought it sounded stupid can skip it. There's no hidden depth, no big surprises, and nothing that'll draw in the uninterested audience member. It's got blood, blow, bear, and basically nothing else.
Screenwriter Jimmy Warden through together the spec script for Cocaine Bear back in 2019. The idea resonated with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller who stepped in to produce. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett were in talks to direct, but they stepped out in favor of Scream V. In their place, Elizabeth Banks signed on, making this her third project as director.
Cocaine Bear follows the exploits of its title character, a 500lb black bear who consumes a great deal of the titular stimulant. The film opens with an extremely swift depiction of the culprit. Drug trafficker and former paratrooper Andrew C. Thornton II tosses millions of dollars worth of cocaine into the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia. The aforementioned black bear swiftly becomes addicted and sets to work killing anyone who happens to be nearby. The park is littered with potential victims including a pair of pre-teens, a single mother, two drug dealers, their demanding boss, a forest ranger, some local teens, and other assorted fodder. What follows is effectively a slasher film set in a massive park with the knife-wielding killer replaced by an unpredictable apex predator.
The true story behind Cocaine Bear is straightforward if a bit sad. The film captures Thornton's fate perfectly. It only starts taking liberties after the bear got involved. In real life, the bear did eat a ton of packaged blow, but it seems to have experienced the negative effects without any upside. There's no way of knowing what the real Cocaine Bear got up to in its brief binge, but the poor creature was found dead with 75 pounds of the stuff in its stomach. The story has provoked interest for years, leading the bear to become an attraction. The Cocaine Bear's stuffed corpse is on display at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, where it earned the name "Pablo Eskobear." Warden's script simply adds some people into the mix and imagines the cartoon version of what could've happened.
The cast of Cocaine Bear is surprisingly strong, but most of them are stuck in predictable archetypes. Keri Russel stars in much the same role she took in Dark Skies and Antlers, the resilient mom who must help her child survive. O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich portray a pair of drug dealers who aren't friendly enough to have chemistry or antagonistic enough to be an odd couple. The late great Ray Liotta, to whom the film is dedicated, is on autopilot as a kingpin who refuses to cut his losses. This is the first of his films to be released after his tragic passing, but he has at least four more in production. Isiah Whitlock Jr. seems to be enjoying his role as a cop pursuing Liotta's character. Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Kristofer Hivju turn in decent character performances. The one having the most fun is probably Christian Convery, who previously starred in Sweet Tooth. It's a decent cast, but this isn't going to be the film any of them are remembered for.
The most likable thing about Cocaine Bear is still its pitch. Someone heard a wild true story and imagined an even wilder version, so they wrote a movie about it. A bunch of famous people heard the idea and signed on to help it become a reality. There's something charming about that, and Hollywood should encourage that kind of behavior. Much like that strange charm, Cocaine Bear's big dumb CGI animal tearing people to shreds is appealing in a quaint way. Animal attack movies like Crawl and Backcountry are unfairly compared to schlock like Sharknado, but they deserve their own slice of the market. Cocaine Bear isn't quite as intelligent as either of those underrated icons, but it's still delivering what it promised.
Drugs are funny, bear attacks are scary, what more does anyone need? Anyone with an answer to that question can probably wait for Cocaine Bear to come to their favorite streaming service. It's an honest simple project without any of the garbage that Hollywood often packs into its other distractions. Cocaine Bear is unlikely to be anyone's favorite film. It'll probably kill at some 14-year-olds' slumber parties later this year. It'll be a bunch of kids' first R-Rated movie, there'll be a few silly memes about it. In a couple of years, people will turn to each other and ask "remember when they made a movie called Cocaine Bear?" Why not enjoy the ride before culture moves on? It's about a bear that does cocaine and no more need be said.
Cocaine Bear
Based loosely on the true story, Cocaine Bear follows an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists, and teens converging in a Georgia forest where a massive black bear stumbles upon and ingests a staggering amount of cocaine, setting the 500-pound bear on a coke-fueled rampage for more blow.. and blood.