Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear suggests a feature-length expansion of an SNL digital short, or a fake movie from 30 Rock. Even then, its feeble premise would have been spread pretty thin across the span of five minutes. Stretched to fill 95 minutes, it quickly grows monotonous, essentially relying on a variation of the same gag for its entire runtime.
Cocaine Bear is set in 1985 and loosely based on real-life events, and you may marvel right away at the immense amount of creative liberties that were taken with what originally amounted to not much more than a startling headline. At the center of it all is a slew of unmemorable stock characters, including single mom Sari (Keri Russell) and two bumbling drug dealers (O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich), circling around a northern Georgia forest searching for a duffel bag’s worth of cocaine that’s been dropped from an airplane.
As the film’s title suggests—no, promises—a bear has gotten to the goods first. Though it’s swallowed enough yayo to tranquilize an elephant, the enormous black bear doesn’t meet the fate of its real-life counterpart by suffering what was a most likely instant and painful death. Rather, it goes on a murderous rampage against the dimwitted humans who cross its path.
Cocaine Bear is efficient in getting the ball rolling on delivering that rampage. There’s some thematic groundwork laid at the start about fraught parent-child relations—from Sari choosing her career as a nurse over her daughter, to Ehrenreich’s Eddie being forced to contend with his kingpin father, Syd (Ray Liotta)—that would seem to carry the promise of some kind of reconciliation, but this isn’t a film that’s interested in seriously mixing pathos with its carnage.
The order of the day here is the comical marriage of drug use and extreme violence. And while the film winkingly delivers on that front, its self-awareness turns out to be its only clear-cut drawing card. The jokes can be mildly amusing in the moment, but they’re all redundantly prone to playing on such incongruities as precocious children eating cocaine and saying naughty swear words. But for a film that promises to not transcend shock value, it can also feel rather tame.
Cocaine Bear starts running on fumes almost instantly and peters out before the second brick of cocaine is even devoured. This is a film that finds characters trading irreverent banter at a steady clip and, at one point, tough-guy drug dealers playing a game of 20 questions that leaves them feeling all the feels—all before the bear sinks its paws and teeth into them. Maybe the film could have soared if the carnage felt more gleefully unhinged or unnerving, because then it would have been easier to ignore the fact that, if you replaced the bear with Jason Vorhees, or Freddy Krueger, or just about any other on-screen maniac, you’ve seen this film before.
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