Jonah Naplan   February 24, 2023

I love movies like this. And reader, I do realize that some may call a film critic “odd” for embracing this kind of schlock. But “Cocaine Bear”—a non-stop, raunchy, half cheapjack, and very, very violent movie about a black bear high on cocaine, who starts murdering people left and right, directed by Elizabeth Banks, is the most refined and furthermore, most unabashedly stupid movie I’ve seen in a long time. It slaughters “M3GAN,” “Plane,” “Beast,” and everything in between. I maybe kinda sorta adore it.

Screenwriter Jimmy Warden has here exceptionally exaggerated the footnotes of the true story. The real facts behind “Cocaine Bear” follow a 175-pound Georgia black bear who accidentally ingested some cocaine in 1985, after a drug smuggler dropped numerous loads from an airplane. But instead of being killed by the hard drug’s power, “Cocaine Bear” imagines a scenario in which the animal got high off of the white powder and then went on a furious rampage around Chattahoochee National Forest, killing most of everyone she sees. (It’s revealed the bear is a girl through one of the movie’s biggest laughs).

The movie begins with said drug smuggler (Matthew Rhys) mindlessly jettisoning duffel bag after duffel bag of cocaine out of an aircraft and out into the night air. In the following days, several people go out on a hunt to find them all. Such is how we’re introduced to a few of the film’s primary characters—a pair of buddy drug dealers (Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Ehrenreich’s father, played by Ray Liotta, in a curious conclusion to his several decades long career, and a determined police detective (Isiah Whitlock Jr.). Character actress Margo Martindale portrays a petty park ranger, with a wildlife specialist by her side (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). Also exploring the woods that day is an estranged mother (Keri Russell), searching desperately for her daughter and her daughter’s friend, played respectively by Brooklyn Prince and Christian Convery.

These groups of people belong to converging stories, but all of them are united by terrifying encounters with a black bear, whose nose seems to be powdered white. The bear in “Cocaine Bear” is a strangely majestic aspect of the film—a motion captured CGI creature who was apparently brought to life by a real stuntman. Banks finds just the right amount of hyper-realism with the bear, mixed well with a node of cheesiness that doesn’t make the title animal seem that remotely practical. The bear looks somewhat silly, but is also horrifying, killing her victims in some brutal ways. When the carnage does come in “Cocaine Bear”— which may be more often than you’d expect—it’s gory, but it does make some of the kills seem more imaginative than they would appear on paper.

“Cocaine Bear” is working at its absolute finest when it focuses on the gnarliness of the premise. There are any number of absurd scenes in the film—my favorite, and I think the goriest of which, takes place in an ambulance, and another favorite takes place on top of and around a gazebo. Both had my theater roaring. All of these precious moments remind us of why studio comedy still needs to be preserved in 2023. It’s even simpler than it seems. The audience will laugh and enjoy if your movie is funny and enjoyable.

I almost wish that “Cocaine Bear” leaned EVEN more into comedy, as the film is at its dullest when it centers on actual human characters instead of fuzzy black bears. I, and everyone else, was happiest when the bear roamed about the screen, tearing up the scenery both literally and figuratively. I’ve heard some people complain that the bear wasn’t in the movie enough, but personally, I found the issue to be that the actual humans were in it too often. With a little bit of a slow start with exposition in the beginning, “Cocaine Bear” initially appears to be a tad more tedious than it should. But the problem is simply the human-bear carnage ratio, that may be a wee bit uneven.

That being said, some of the characters are more developed than others. Keri Russell’s presence as the mother in the movie is one of the more compelling, and the two kids she’s searching for are reminiscent of the crassness the child stars of the 80s and 90s used to project. Ehrenreich and O’Shea are a lot of fun, and when the movie isn’t focusing on a murderous bear, they steal the screen. I was particularly delighted by an incident taking place in a bathroom.

But the real spotlight is never detained from the bear, a movie character sure to inspire meme phenomena in the following months. Watching the bear is bundles and bundles of endless fun, and reminds me of the best parts of “M3GAN” from last month, except cranked up to eleven and made seven times more gory. I guess I just wish that the film entirely owned the idea that audiences going to see “Cocaine Bear” don’t pay much mind to inherent storytelling, and just want to see the delicious carnage unfold. The movie is more than just a gag, and actually has a number of suspenseful sequences throughout, yet the film proves it’s in on the joke from the very start and doesn’t let up until the end. Trailers and posters for “Cocaine Bear” proved that Elizabeth Banks and her team of Hollywood magicians knew exactly what they were doing, but the film has its biggest pratfalls when trying to step away from that concept.

But what have you. For a movie that involves a character getting his intestines ripped out and then slurped up by baby black bears, I should just be impressed that it contains more substance than herein. And truthfully, I had an absolute blast. So in the words of Roger Ebert’s review of the 2013 Best Picture winner, “Argo,” Hooray for Hollywood!

Now playing in theaters.