“Dumb fun with a great cast, Cocaine Bear manages to deal the good stuff without forgetting the sort of film it’s trying to be.”
Veteran cast having fun with their roles
Multigenerational appeal of coke-addicted killer bears
Weak anti-drug messaging
Judging by the crowd that turned out for the first local screening of Elizabeth Banks’ gory killer-bear comedy, Cocaine Bear might be the movie event of the year. Banks’ weird, wild movie is loosely inspired by the real story of an American black bear that ingested a massive amount of cocaine dumped in the wilderness by a drug smuggler in 1985. In the real world, the bear sadly died from an overdose, but Banks’ R-rated film imagines a timeline in which that bear went on a cocaine-fueled murder spree across the forests of Georgia, ripping tourists, rangers, and ambitious drug smugglers to bloody shreds.
It’s a premise that clearly resonates across a wide, generational spectrum, but is it any good? At its best, Cocaine Bear is a mixed bag. The film’s impressive cast mostly feels like they’re in on the joke, and it generally maintains a sweet spot between full-on camp and taking itself too seriously.
An inside joke
Banks assembles a great ensemble of actors in Cocaine Bear who know when to oversell the drama and when to play it straight.
Playing a henchman tasked with retrieving the cocaine, O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton) is positioned as a sort of audience surrogate, observing (and experiencing) the madness of it all through a (relatively) rational lens. Conversely, the reliably entertaining Margo Martindale (Justified) plays an impulsive, gun-toting forest ranger with an inferiority complex and an itchy trigger finger who’s primed to add more chaos to the saga.
The cast is filled out by Keri Russell (The Americans) as a mother in a neon-pink track suit searching for her missing daughter, who was kidnapped — and inexplicably, not torn apart — by the bear. The Florida Project actress Brooklynn Prince plays the daughter, while Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth) portrays the girl’s best friend, who seems all too aware that these events are going to turn him into a therapist’s most lucrative client.