Cocaine Bear Review
The drug-fuelled mayhem on display here always seems remote, distant and not quite as chaotic as it should be - after all, this is a movie where a black bear snorts mountains of cocaine and eats a significant number of people. Nevertheless, Cocaine Bear is still a perfectly acceptable time in the theatre.
A drug lord drops tonnes of cocaine from an airplane above Blood Mountain, and dies in the process of parachuting to retrieve it. The littered cocaine is found by a pair of kids skipping school to take pictures of the waterfall in the national park, but it has already been found by a black bear. The white powder makes the bear blood-crazed and vengeance fuelled, and it begins a steady rampage of killing, or grievously wounding, a series of park goers.
Directed by Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine Bear has an odd sort of emptiness about it. Sure, there are plenty of laughs, and a heap of gory, cocaine-fuelled bear attacks, but the story around it and the characters populating that story feel so incredibly at odds with the actual conceit on display, that you get this sense of wondering emptiness.
The characters across the board are just strange cardboard cutouts. The plot for each of them - including a Fargo-esque park ranger, a Speilbergian single-mum family, and a Ray Liotta starring drug side-plot - never really connects, or feels lived in the same way that the world of this cocaine bear does. It’s frustrating, because there are a bunch of great actors on display here; the stories just never really gel together.
When the film does succeed though, it succeeds in spades. Predominantly, this is when we are dealing with the bear gruesomely attacking the various people in his park. Banks has plenty of fun playing with horror and thriller tropes, with Jaws seemingly a large inspiration. But as the film ratchets up, she also ratchets up the gore. Her pacing with the bear itself is incredibly on point, and engaging. Plenty of laughs are to be had from that bloody mess, but also plenty of yelps of fear and excitement.
It’s a shame that her sure hand with the titular beast of this story doesn’t extend to its human counterparts. If it had done, we may have a bit of a cult classic on our hands a la Snakes on a Plane. As it is, Cocaine Bear is a perfectly acceptable Sunday afternoon watch, but perhaps wait until it hits Netflix or Foxtel; there’s little staying power in this one.
