Give in to gory roar on drugs

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This article was published 24/02/2023 (1270 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Cocaine Bear. It’s all there in the title.

Putting the “high” into high concept, this nutso horror-comedy about an apex predator hepped up on coke joins Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado as movies with supremely self-evident plots.

Like those not-so-illustrious predecessors, Cocaine Bear raises the question of whether this is a premise that’s better in anticipation — in trailers, memes and jokes — than it ends up being when stretched into an actual 95-minute movie.

In this case, actor-turned-director Elizabeth Banks (Pitch Perfect 2, Charlie’s Angels), working from a script by James Warden (The Babysitter: Killer Queen), delivers exactly what you’d expect — but not a whole lot more. Cocaine Bear is a sturdy, scruffy coked-up creature feature, a B-movie with an A-list cast that plays things (relatively) straight while enjoying its own silliness.

Put it this way: If you’re going to get a kick out of watching a 220-kilo animal snorting a line of coke off a severed human leg, then Cocaine Bear is for you.

The story is based — so, so loosely — on a 1985 case in which a drug runner tossed duffel-bags of cocaine into the Chattahoochee National Forest as his plane was going down. An unfortunate black bear was later found dead after ingesting several bricks of blow.

Now, because your average black bear is a generally peaceable omnivore, and because the real-life cocaine bear died of cardiac arrest after consuming illicit drugs dropped into its habitat as a result of human greed and incompetence, it seems fair that its fictionalized counterpart will take some revenge.

And the score-settling gets gory here, as the bear, basically out of its mind on drugs and snuffling manically for its next high, tears through the hapless human beings who have ventured into the Georgia woods, including law enforcement officers, drug dealers, park rangers, teenage punks, an ambulance crew and a couple of doomed Norwegians.

Keri Russell (The Americans) anchors this rudimentary story as Sari, a harassed but determined mom who heads to the forest to find daughter Dee Dee and her friend Henry (excellent child actors Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery) after they skip school.

Other unwitting bits of bear-bait include the late Ray Liotta (Goodfellas) — this being one of the last films he made before his death — as a menacing drug lord; “character actor Margo Martindale” as a dangerously ineffective ranger; and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (The Wire) as a very weary cop. Alden Ehrenreich (Solo) and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton) are reluctant low-level drug criminals, who get into long, involved conversational gambits as a bit of low-key comic relief.

The title character is played by performance-capture actor Allan Henry, later bulked up into a big bear with not-bad CGI.

Horror-comedy can be a tricky tightrope. Here, the tone is cheerfully callous as the bear tears off limbs and heads, chewing its way through the just and the unjust. Banks rarely lingers on graphic gore, however, preferring short, sharp shocks.

The deliberately dopey action is also mainly subtext-free.

There do seem to be one or two points of possible social comment. Guns do almost as much damage to the humans as the bear here, for instance, and all those kilos of cocaine are (briefly) juxtaposed with footage of the “Just say no” campaigns and “War on Drugs” rhetoric of the 1980s.

But that’s really by-the-way. Mostly Cocaine Bear is about, well, … a bear on cocaine. That’s about it, take it or leave it.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca