As an ersatz trailer popping up in the middle of a Grindhouse sequel or during the waning minutes of an especially uneven SNL episode, Cocaine Bear might have come across as mildly amusing, if only because it would lasted a mere couple of minutes and not quite had enough time to completely run out of steam. As a full-length feature, though, the latest directorial effort (for lack of a more appropriate phrase) from Elizabeth Banks is a formless, stupid and mirthless exercise in pure tedium that offers viewers one (1) basic joke and then spends the next ninety-five (95) minutes repeating it over and over until it loses whatever comedic potential it may have once held (this is at approximately minute 16) and then proceeds to continue on with it anyway. The result is about as dire a cinematic experience as you are likely to endure this year, though I suppose its very existence will give some degree of hope to aspiring screenwriters everywhere—after all, if a project as shitty as this one can get funded and released by a major studio, perhaps there is hope for their efforts after all.
Bizarrely enough, the film is loosely (more like promiscuously) inspired by a real-life incident that occurred in 1985, when numerous packages of cocaine were dropped over Georgia by a drug smuggler who then jumped out of the plane with 80 pounds of drugs strapped to his body, only to die when his chute failed to open. About 40 kilograms or so, worth millions of dollars, ended up landing in a forest and were unwittingly consumed by a black bear who, it is assumed, died immediately afterwards of massive heart failure. It was the kind of story that inspires undeniably eye-catching headlines but not much more and is ultimately a bit sad, whether your sympathies lie with the bear who died needlessly or all the cocaine that was lost/wasted as a result.
Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden have taken that minor news nugget and spun it off into something entirely different. Here, while the setup is the same—cocaine lands from the sky and bear ingests a large amount of it—the result is different because instead of immediately keeling over, the drug turns the bear into a violent marauder hellbent on gruesomely shredding anyone stupid enough to happen into its path. Luckily for it, a lot of people turn up in the forest that day—including a couple of kids playing hooky (Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery), the mother of one of them (Keri Russell), a dim-witted park ranger (Margo Martindale), a pair of drug couriers (Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson Jr.), a cop (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) in pursuit of the drugs and assorted other idiots—and a good number of them end up being torn apart like fresh bread. Oh, and when the film starts lagging, which is often, it has the bear find and ingest another package of coke so that it can go frothing mad once again.
To be fair, it is possible to read Cocaine Bear on a couple of different levels. On the one hand, by telling the story of an ordinary group of people whose lives are unexpectedly shaken by the inexplicable and impossible-to-placate presence of a giant bear out of its mind on drugs, one could possibly read it as a way of grappling with the madness that has gripped our country over the last few years. At the same time, it could also be seen as a wild rebuke to the ways in which moviemaking has lost its nerve and daring in recent years amid an array of superhero extravaganzas and exploitations of corporate IP holdings by offering eyebrow-raising content ranging from graphic disembowelments to the sight of two pre-teen kids sampling some of the cocaine for themselves.
If Banks and Warden were going for the former, then the film doesn’t work because they aren’t really saying anything of interest or value along those lines—they are just indulging in chaotic behavior that grows more wearying than anything after a short time and while that may in some way mirror the times, it will leave all but the most indulgent viewers feeling sagged and exhausted after a while. If they are simply going for a wallow in the kind of cinematic anarchy that the studios have shied away from in the last decade or two, then they have failed here as well because the shock value of the material is mediocre at best and only rarely hits that level. Other than that, the film doesn’t offer much more than a bunch of actors wandering around aimlessly in the service of a director who seems to be grasping at straws—no pun intended—in virtually every scene. (This is arguably her weakest directorial effort to date, which is saying something when you consider that her other projects behind the camera include Pitch Perfect 2, the Charlie’s Angels reboot and a segment of Movie 43.)
Once the initial buzz surrounding the film and its premise/title wear off—and that should evaporate quicker than an actual coke high—my guess is that the only aspect of Cocaine Bear that will last in the minds of most moviegoers is the fact that it turned out to be the final film project for the late Ray Liotta, who turns up as the mid-level drug lord whose shipment got lost in the first place and who is the father of one of the couriers on the hunt. He isn’t in it that much and his final on-screen moments are not exactly dignified but he is the one who probably comes closest to making something out of the material that he has been handed here. In a weird irony, it turns out that Liotta began his big-screen career with a small appearance in a blatantly sleazy Universal Pictures release involving coked-out beast—the semi-immortal Harold Robbins adaptation The Lonely Lady—and concluded it in much the same way. However, this is the only time that I can immediately think of where a comparison involving a Harold Robbins-inspired film has resulted in the Robbins-related project coming across as smarter and classier by comparison.
Unless you are a Liotta completist, feel free to turn your nose up to Cocaine Bear. However, if you must see a film this weekend involving a chemically unbalanced bear wreaking freaky havoc on unsuspecting dopes, make it a rental of John Frankenheimer’s nutzoid 1979 horror film Prophecy—a terrible movie, to be sure, but at least one that has enough genuine craziness to it to make it somewhat watchable.