Cocaine Bear

What’s It About, Del Boy?

Cocaine Bear
USA 2023 Universal
Directed by Elizabeth Banks
UK cinema release print

To probably quote many other critics, I’m sure, Cocaine Bear is a movie which very much does what it says on the tin. It was a film I mainly got interested in from the buzz surrounding the title (I had a similar attraction to the movie Snakes On A Plane for the same reason) and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Also, I don’t really know Elisabeth Banks as an actress but I did like the previous movie she directed (and starred in), the 2019 reboot of Charlie’s Angels (reviewed here).

Okay, so call me naive (I’m sure a lot of you will call me that and worse) but I went into Cocaine Bear not realising it was an out and out comedy. I mean, I knew it was based... or in this case perhaps ‘inspired’ is a better word... on a true incident in 1985 and I knew there was never going to be a shred of reality or truth to the way the real life events were depicted. Two things are true... one is that, while dumping drugs out of a plane, a man’s parachute failed to open and he died from the fall. Two, a bear ate a quantity of the cocaine he dropped. Those are the only two things that this movie shares with the actual incident, as far as I can tell. In reality, the bear died from the consumption of the narcotics within five minutes (and is now stuffed and displayed somewhere).

This film is about the rampage of the bear as she goes to protect her two cubs from interfering humans and, mostly, tries to find more cocaine to consume. It’s also about various disconnected bunches of humans who find themselves in the forest (or park as they are in the US, from what I understand, not bearing any resemblance to UK parks so much... at least not the ones I know). Of these humans, my ‘favourite performances of the movie’ shout out go to Kerri Russell as a mother trying to find her teenage daughter, Alden (Han Solo) Ehrenreich as a grieving member of a drug cartel who has been sent to the forest to find the drugs along with his friend played by O'Shea Jackson Jr. and, last but by no means least, Scott Seiss... who I just found out is exactly the person I thought he reminded me of in only his second ever part in a movie. Seiss, it turns out, is the man who does those ‘angry retail guy’ sketches and posts them on YouTube and twitter... and yeah, this guy definitely deserves to be in more movies after his hilarious performance in this, I would say.

Lastly, Ray Liota is also in this film and he gets a dedication in the end credits (stay for two post credits scenes, by the way, if you want to catch every drop of the movie). Ray plays the nasty guy who wants his drugs back and sends his boy to get them. It was his last movie role before he died, one week after recording his ADR for this one.  

And it took a while to grow on me, truth be told. As I said, I was expecting more of a modern, retro exploitation film than a comedy and comedy certainly isn’t my favourite movie genre (unless it’s got The Marx Brothers or Woody Allen in it, you’re going to have to work hard to get me to stay). So for the initial set up, I was less than comfortable with a film that was obviously being played for laughs with some quite broad comedy but, after a while, I began to get on board with it. After all, it’s competently put together (with a caveat I’ll get to) and it’s well acted by a whole host of comic performers... it’s too long to list all of them here. For me though, I really got into it when the emergency Ambulance showed up with Scott Seiss on board as one of the paramedics, partnered up by the equally excellent  Kahyun Kim. The scenes which follow their arrival are quite funny and pulled me into things, for sure.

It is a fun movie and, yeah, I was rooting for a lot of the humans to survive it. That being said, I thought the film was edited in a peculiar manner. There are gaps where it’s implied what’s happened in scenes cross-cutting between sets of characters rather than seeing the actual things happening, making almost unnatural jumps in the narrative. Now, I really don’t mind not being shown everything and filling in the gaps for myself without being spoonfed data but, I dunno, a fast paced comedy movie seems to need those kinds of moments more, I would have thought. My first thought was that it was a level of competence, or lack of, in terms of what ended up on screen and my initial assumption as I was watching was that the crew hadn’t been able to capture all the footage they wanted. However, there’s a really odd editing decision later on where a flashback to a scene we didn’t see is suddenly cut into a conversation (leaving me completely baffled for a minute as to what I was watching) and I realised that coverage wasn’t the problem, this was an artistic decision on the part of the director. So, yeah, it’s not the way I would have gone with the movie but the film doesn’t lose much clarity from this approach and it works just fine, I guess.

All in all, after about a half an hour into the movie, I have to say that I had a pretty good time with Cocaine Bear and would certainly recommend it to my friends who like comedies. I’m still in two minds as to whether I’ll follow this up with a Blu Ray purchase a little way down the line (maybe when it hits the sales). But, a good evening at the cinema at any rate and, if drug fuelled bear rampages played for comic effect are your thing, you will definitely want to give this one a go.