Cocaine Bear: Just Say No, by David Bax

Even if you were immediately put off by the eyeroll-inducing, “that’s so random!” title of Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear (or by the fact that Banks herself has not proven a worthwhile commodity as director), there actually is one reason you might have still held out hope the movie might be good. Namely, this cast is stacked. Keri Russell! Alden Ehrenreich! O’Shea Jackson Jr.! Isaiah Whitlock Jr.! Margo Martindale! Matthew Rhys! Ray Liotta, in one of his final roles! The little girl from The Florida Project! Unfortunately, they’re all wasted in this sweaty, cringey endeavor. Ultimately, Cocaine Bear will only be enjoyable to people who think a movie called Cocaine Bear sounds enjoyable.
Trouble rears its head almost immediately when a pair of hikers (including Kristofer Hivju of Force Majeure and Game of Thrones) encounter a computer-generated bear behaving in an outlandishly erratic manner. For reasons having to do with animal welfare, there are strong arguments to be made for the use of CG creatures over real ones. But that doesn’t change the fact that CG imagery has almost never been used successfully to draw laughs. A puppet or a guy in a suit would have fared better.
Cocaine Bear wastes no time getting to the carnage. This is a horror movie more in the sense of being gory–at times extremely so, at fewer times creatively so–than being scary.
In fact, Banks leans into excess in every way, not just with blood and guts. Perhaps there’s a comment in there on the exaggerated nature of the 1980s; the story takes place in 1985. The exaggerated macho swagger of Reagan’s America was turned inward by the war on drugs at its height. The bear in question is high on a massive stash of cocaine dropped from a smuggler’s plane.
Which leads us to Cocaine Bear‘s other genre. In addition to being a horror/comedy, it’s a backwoods crime flick. The cocaine in question belongs to a St. Louis drug lord (Liotta) and he sends his two henchmen (Ehrenreich and Jackson) to retrieve it by any means necessary. Screenwriter Jimmy Warden is taking inspiration from Elmore Leonard but the simplistic plot details and unoriginal characters do more to dishonor the legendary writer’s name than pay homage.
But back to the problems with the CG bear. Along with the nonstop, hysterical gross-out attempts at comedy, it all adds up to Cocaine Bear‘s biggest failing. It’s just not funny. It’s loud, sure. Outrageous, maybe. But, as animalistic horror/comedies go, it makes Piranha 3D look like the goddamn Marx Brothers.