Review: Cocaine Bear (2023)

Cocaine Bear (2023)

Rated R for bloody violence and gore, drug content and language throughout

Score: 4 out of 5

...yup. There's really not a whole lot I can say about Cocaine Bear that isn't right there on the poster and in the very title. It's a film, based very loosely on a true story from the 1980s, about an American black bear that gets its nose into a big shipment of cocaine that was dropped in Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest by drug traffickers, and proceeds to go on a drug-fueled rampage against everybody who sets foot in the forest. (In real life, the bear simply died of an overdose. Its taxidermied corpse is now on display in a mall in Lexington, Kentucky.) It's a movie that's more or less trying to do what Snakes on a Plane did, a comedic killer animal flick that was made to become an internet meme and plays out like Jaws if it were written by sketch comedy writers (which isn't far from the truth, as this film was directed by Elizabeth Banks and produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller), and in my opinion, it pulls it off more successfully. The cast played their characters seriously enough that I actually cared about whether they lived or died, which made the film's drug humor, '80s references, and druggie bear antics that much funnier, and while I could never really call it scary, it still had some vicious kills to it and plenty of gore. The cast felt overstuffed early on with multiple subplots taking time away from each other and the bear, but once the bear started solving that problem in the way that a bear typically does, things moved along much more smoothly. It's a movie where everybody involved understood the assignment and delivered exactly the movie you'd expect, a simple, short, and sweet horror-comedy about a killer bear.

For a movie with a premise like this, it actually takes a bit of time before it really gets to the cocaine bear, instead spending the first act following various people who are about to get caught up in the bear's rampage: the criminals Daveed and Eddie who get dispatched by Eddie's drug lord father Syd White to retrieve the cocaine, the mother and nurse Sari who is searching for her daughter Dee Dee after she cut class with her friend Henry to explore the forest, the detective Bob from Knoxville, Tennessee who heads down to the forest after the drug smuggler's body lands up in his jurisdiction, a trio of local teen delinquents named the Duchamps who have stumbled upon the cocaine and want to take it and sell it for themselves, and the park ranger Liz who winds up dragged into everything that's happening in her forest. It's a surprisingly big cast for a movie like this, filled with recognizable faces, and if you ask me, it was perhaps a bit too big. The first act is jam-packed with subplots on top of subplots such that it doesn't really have much room to breathe, and I probably would have narrowed the focus of the film to just the two pools of characters who actually matter while treating the rest as cannon fodder. Character development matters, but it was clear from the start who existed purely to get killed off in creative fashion, and there's a reason why most body-count horror movies reserve the real subplots for the people who we're still gonna be following in the third act.

Which is why my enjoyment of the film was directly proportional to the number of people the bear had killed, as it not only provided scenes of a coked-up bear killing and eating people, it narrowed and sharpened the film's focus by removing extraneous characters. The bear was noticeably a CG creature effect, but given the outrageous tone the film was going for, I was able to forgive some of the spotty effects, especially when the practical effects work of things like hands and legs getting torn off and a man's guts getting ripped out and eaten was top-notch. Little of it was particularly scary outside a few moments, but this was a comedy more than it was a horror movie, and both the character beats and the more farcical humor, from things like Daveed's anger over his favorite jersey getting ruined and young Henry accidentally inhaling some airborne powder and showing signs throughout the film that he's high on cocaine (and, of course, the antics of the titular bear), kept me laughing throughout. It's simple humor, but it worked.

The cast, too, knocked it out of the park and made me care more about their characters than I normally would have. The thing was that, even amidst the antics going on around them, they were all playing it pretty straight -- Keri Russell and Brooklynn Prince played Sari and Dee Dee like they were in a serious thriller about a mother searching for her daughter, Alden Ehrenreich and O'Shea Jackson, Jr. (son of Ice Cube) played Eddie and Daveed like they were in a crime drama about a missing drug shipment, the late Ray Liotta (in his final film role) played Syd as a vile scumbag of a drug lord, and there was even a European hiker, Olaf, played by Kristofer Hivju who drops the "funny foreigner" shtick and starts acting legitimately horrified and heartbroken after his fiancé Elsa becomes the bear's first victim. The fact that the film took its characters seriously may have weighed it down in the first act when it was overstuffed with them, but as the film went on, it grounded the affairs and gave them real stakes that made me want to see these people get out alive (and outright cheer when Syd finally got what he had coming to him).

The Bottom Line

Cocaine Bear is exactly what it says on the tin, and it delivers exactly what it promises in a very fun package. To quote the tagline on the poster, get in line.