Mark Reviews Movies: COCAINE BEAR

Cocaine Bear, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 23, 2023

There's simply an absence of humanity in Cocaine Bear, an alleged comedy that tries to elicit laughs from grief, trauma, and the bloody violence enacted by a bear fueled on cocaine. If the movie had taken the route of a straightforward horror tale, it might have worked, but the comedic approach—specifically this form of it, which buys into the gimmickry of a single idea at the expense of every other element of storytelling—really undoes everything.

The story is "inspired by" a true one, in that a bear did apparently die of an overdose on cocaine that had been dropped from a plane during a failed drug run in 1985. Jimmy Warden's script imagines that said bear went on a killing spree while trying to maintain its sudden addiction to the drug, and after a while, one might start feeling a great amount of sympathy or pity for this digitally rendered bear, if only because Warden seems adamant that we shouldn't feel a thing for any of the human characters in this story.

Some of that might be deserved, especially when we're talking about the people whose actions start the whole mess in the first place. One of those people is the guy who drops the drugs out of the plane as it's about to crash, and he gets his comeuppance almost immediately when, in one of the movie's earliest and only funny gags (never a good combination of words when describing a comedy), the guy whacks his head on the plane's hatch as he's about to jump with a parachute, knocking him unconscious.

The now-dead man was in the employ of Syd (the late Ray Liotta), a St. Louis-based gangster, who wants the drugs recovered. He assigns Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) and his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) to do this job. The joke here is that Eddie is distraught over the recent death of his wife to cancer, and isn't it just hilarious that the guy, who quit the "family business" for his wife, can't help but get choked up whenever he thinks of her or his now-motherless son? Seriously, what is the joke here?

It's a bit like the gag that opens the movie, one supposes, in which a pair of Norwegian hikers (played by Kristofer Hivju and Hannah Hoekstra), taking a post-engagement trip in northern Georgia, encounter a black bear that has become especially wild after ingesting some of that cocaine that fell from the sky. The poor guy watches, helpless, as his fiancée is dragged and mauled by the ferocious bear, and the punch line comes when her foot lands right in front of him. Is it supposed to be funny because of the gore, on account of the accents, or simply because the movie supposes we're as heartless as the movie's general viewpoint toward any kind of pain and suffering?

Beyond all of this, the whole narrative is a thin excuse to put as many people in the path of this bear as possible. We meet the gangsters, the hiker (whose trauma is later played as a joke yet again), a horny park ranger (played by Margo Martindale) who accidentally shoots a teenager in the head, and a goofy environmentalist (played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson) who forgets that bears can climb trees before we watch the life drain from his face in a lengthy shot and his dead body used for a cheap pratfall. Also set to find the cocaine is a police detective (played by Isiah Whitlock Jr.) out of Knoxville, where the unconscious skydiver landed, and worthy of at least some degree of sympathy is Sari (Keri Russell), a local nurse who is searching for her missing daughter (played by Brooklynn Prince).

Anyway, the real point is that most of these people, as well as a few others who are dispatched by the bear almost as quickly and randomly as they're introduced by the screenplay, are attacked, mutilated, beheaded, dragged across asphalt, stabbed, shot, or otherwise injured/killed by the bear or somebody else that isn't long for the movie under the circumstances. Just as the script settles on the gimmick of the title as its only purpose, director Elizabeth Banks' approach is solely to shock with the blood and gore. Because there's no reason to care for the majority of these characters (mostly because the movie seems to intentionally keep them at a distance) and the process is so repetitive, whatever shock there is here wears off pretty quickly.

Cocaine Bear becomes a slog of cruelty for no reason except that we should laugh at it. As for the rationale behind that comedy, it's just as a mean—and meaningless.

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