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2023
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Feb 24, 2023 · Screenwriter Jimmy Warden has taken the basic facts—a 175-pound Georgia black bear ingested some cocaine that a drug smuggler dropped from an airplane in 1985—and imagined what might have happened if the bear hadn’t died, but rather sampled the stuff and gotten hooked.
Feb 24, 2023 · 66% Tomatometer 324 Reviews 71% Audience Score 2,500+ Verified Ratings Inspired by the 1985 true story of a drug runner's plane crash, missing cocaine, and the black bear that ate it, this wild...
- (323)
- Elizabeth Banks
- R
- Keri Russell
Feb 24, 2023 · After a pratfall in a plane leads a smuggler to drop a ton of drugs on the mountains of Georgia, a bear discovers it, snorts it up and turns into a mix of Tony Montana and Jason Voorhees.
- Jason Zinoman
- Elizabeth Banks
Feb 24, 2023 · Universal’s Cocaine Bear — in theaters now — from director Elizabeth Banks is plenty of fun so long as you’ve got a high tolerance for gore and two-dimensional characters.
- Charles Pulliam-Moore
- A gory, hilarious, and totally fun as hell horror comedy that rarely overdoses on the joke.
- Which Drug + Animal Movie Do You Wanna See Next?
- Cocaine Bear Photos
- Verdict
By Brian Altano
Updated: Feb 26, 2023 5:33 am
Posted: Feb 23, 2023 9:27 pm
Neil deGrasse Tyson would probably be stomping his feet in anger at Cocaine Bear, repeatedly yelling “Wrong! Bears can’t do that!” over an increasingly annoyed theater crowd. But personally, I’m a huge fan of “deadly beast goes on a killing spree” films. I rent every mediocre shark attack movie when it launches straight to streaming because there’s something oddly satisfying about watching arrogant, headstrong, generally unlikeable surfers or college kids on a boating trip gone awry get torn to shreds. Cocaine Bear has all of those cheap, guilty pleasures in spades, but unlike something like Sharknado, its coked-up bear is actually convincing enough to be scary when it tears apart every morally questionable person it comes across.
So yes, Cocaine Bear is a very stupid movie. You probably guessed that from the pitch: a bear finds cocaine in the woods, eats it, and then very bad things happen. So it shouldn’t surprise you that this isn’t a thinking person’s film. Nor should it be. It’s a movie called “Cocaine Bear.” What is surprising, though, is how well it works, assuming you can meet it on its ridiculous terms.
The real-life story of an American black bear who ingested 75 pounds of cocaine in 1985 after a drug drop gone wrong ended in the bear’s instant death, obviously. In reality, bears can’t really handle 75 pounds of cocaine. Pretty much nobody can. The movie Cocaine Bear, on the other hand (or paw, I guess) proposes, “What if that bear had instead lived, and gone on a rampage through a dense forest, killing nearly everyone in its path while hunting down even more cocaine, a substance it has become quite fond of.” But unlike things like Snakes on a Plane – a movie that asks, “What if there were snakes on a plane?” – or Sharknado – a movie that asks “What if there were sharks in a tornado?” – Cocaine Bear is actually surprisingly well made. It’s both very funny and very violent, providing us with a comically blood-soaked day in the park with a murderous bear on cocaine.
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The horror aspect of it is kind of like Jaws – no, this isn’t a Spielberg masterpiece, but stick with me for a second here. Jaws is a scary movie in part because sharks exist in the ocean and they occasionally attack people. So it played on the fear that you could become shark food the next time you spend the day at the beach, and it amped that fear up to 11 by making a shark that’s enormous and intentionally hunting people, which doesn’t really happen. Along the same lines, any of us might encounter a large bear on a camping trip or hike in real life, but none of us will ever encounter one on tons of cocaine. So a Cocaine Bear scenario will not happen to you or your family, and that makes it immensely fun watching it happen to other people, especially when several of those people don’t really have the best motives in mind.
The kills here mostly work because they’re gory, maniacal, and often just straight-up hilarious. In reality, bears don’t generally bother to kill their victims before eating them, they just start ripping and tearing. Throw in cocaine and it’s definitely much less likely to handle its dinner with grace. It’s brutal, but you’re not quite rooting for most of the characters because many of them don’t have enough time to make a smart decision given the insane situation they’ve just found themselves in, and several of them are straight-up bad but likable people attempting to find cocaine themselves. You’re also not quite rooting for the bear because it’s a violent animal who finds cocaine, finds out it loves cocaine, and goes on a warpath to find more cocaine. Rather, we’re watching a bunch of chaotic elements get dumped into a forest and celebrating with selfish glee as they all begin to clash violently and comedically. When the bear shows up in a scene we have no idea if it’s fiending for human blood or its next fix, so anything could happen.
Cocaine is pretty much scattered everywhere in this movie, which seems crazy, but it kind of was back then. It was the mid ‘80s. Most of your favorite movies and music from that era were fueled almost entirely by small mountains of that white powdery substance, so even if you personally have a hard stance against the drug (I don’t mess with it myself) just by being a fan of those things you’re basically a byproduct of secondhand smoke. Or coke, I guess. There’s not really a message here because Cocaine Bear doesn’t overly romanticize cocaine or sternly denounce it beyond the fact that in this movie, doing a line (or eating a kilo) is the equivalent of teens having sex in a slasher movie. Rather, it uses cocaine as an ingredient that, when dumped liberally on a scene, causes everyone that interacts with it to become frenetic, obsessive, and insane. It’s like when Kamek the Magikoopa waves a magic wand over a boss fight in Super Mario or blood rains from the ceiling in the nightclub scene in Blade.
Cocaine Bear celebrates its nonsensical story, gives its characters (and its bear) plenty to chew on, provides a script with jokes that mostly land and kills that frequently delight, and gives us exactly and specifically what we signed up for. I hesitate to say you should shut your brain off to enjoy this movie as much as I did because I think that...
- Brian Altano
Cocaine Bear delivers precisely what it promised: an absolutely insane bear wreaking bloody, gory, visually shocking havoc while committing unimaginably ridiculous actions.
Feb 23, 2023 · A coked-out bear goes on a murderous rampage in 'Cocaine Bear,' which was directed by Elizabeth Banks and inspired by a real-life case.
