When a black bear becomes addicted to the white powder, everyone in its vicinity, from park rangers (Margo Martindale) to a nurse (Keri Russell) looking for missing kids to drug dealers (O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich), are fair game.
Will anyone survive? Will the Cocaine Bear find all the coke?
This movie sounds like a gimmick.
To its credit, the film just hangs together beyond a one- joke premise.
The movie is more of a slasher movie in structure, with various groups of characters stumbling into the bear, which is on its own quest to chow down on more of the white stuff.
There is a running theme of parents and children:
Keri Russell plays a single mom searching for her daughter who has skipped school to hike through the park; Ehrenreich is despondent over his wife’s death, and wonders how it will affect his son; his father (Ray Liotta) happens to be the drug dealer responsible for everything; and the cocaine bear is a mom with cubs.
The cast are great - Isiah Whitlock Jr and Margo Martindale play the tone perfectly. O’Shea Jackson Jr and Alden Ehrenreich have solid chemistry. Even the kids are good.
There are some shaky elements:
While the film has a decent sense of comic timing, the stabs at other genres are a little weird.
The film’s one fight scene is awkwardly covered and edited, and the movie botches some of the scares - they are staged and blocked in ways that are just off. There are scenes where characters are attacked from behind and dragged into the bushes which seem to have been shot from the wrong angle.
The film’s ultimate success lies in the bear itself - it is both frightening and surreal, and when the movie manages that juxtaposition, it really works. Whether it is - in one great moment - snorting coke in an anthropomorphic way; charging after an ambulance, descending a tree to climb another tree because the guy in the tree is covered in coke…
The set-piece involving the paramedics and the ambulance is solid stuff, with some great OTT gore.
This is a silly movie which wears its silliness on its sleeve. Thankfully, it goes about its business with tongue in cheek but no winking at the audience. The movie knows that the title is enough.
There’s nothing much to it. Watch with friends and the right stimulants.
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