Cocaine Bear is the movie we never knew we needed
"Let's make a movie about a 500-pound bear who gets tanked on cocaine and eats a bunch of people" has never been said by anyone. Ever.
Until now. And it's a good thing someone did.
Director Elizabeth Banks - no stranger to far-fetched concepts; after all, her "breakout role" was in this 2012 flick about kids killing each other that dragged the GDP of Samoa through the box offices - certainly knew what people came to the theater to see, and delivered: the bear ate someone within the first five minutes of the film. Then there's a long interlude before the second kill for character development, but that's okay. You can only have a bear eat so many people in one film before the audience starts asking if that's all you have.
Logically enough, most of this film's $35 million budget went to a CGI company to create the animated bear. I mean, you probably wouldn't want to use a live bear for this - the real-world Cocaine Bear died of an overdose and, so far as we know, didn't eat anyone before he died, and it might be hard to hire talent if they knew they were going to be eaten by a bear during filming. I've been asked to do some crazy shit in my time in the workforce, and even I would put my foot down at that. For some reason I don't think the CGI company they used ever saw a real black bear; the head is too weirdly shaped to be credible. However...considering that this is a movie about a coked-up bear that eats people, the shape of the beast's head isn't all that critical.
Ray Liotta is fantastic as Syd, the druglord living on borrowed time. His bosses have promised to kill him if he doesn't bring back all the cocaine that was thrown out of the airplane in the first thirty seconds of the movie and he knows two important things: the cops, who don't give you your drugs back, have half of it and the bear ate the rest. Unfortunately for him the bear killed him, but this may be fortunate for him because the guys who were going to kill him would have taken their sweet time about it.
Keri Russell does a respectable job as Sari, a nurse and single mother of a rebellious daughter. She winds up in the action because her kid has decided to ditch school to paint an en plein air picture of a waterfall.
The rest of the cast is straight out of a Coen Brothers movie.
Cocaine Bear doesn't succeed in spite of the ludicrous nature of its premise, but because of it. Elizabeth Banks has singlehandedly destroyed the B-movie industry with this film - now you'll need good actors and proper dialogue to pull off your cheesy movies. Think of your favorite B movie, and Cocaine Bear is head and haunches above it.
There's a rather charming scene where Sari's daughter and her friend find a brick of cocaine the bear hadn't gotten around to eating yet and try to take some of it. They try to eat it rather than snorting it and realize doing cocaine is not the hobby for them.
At the end of the movie the only one who comes out with a good outcome is...the bear. She's kicked her drug habit and is living happily with her cubs while all the humans are either traumatized for life, shot dead or converted to bear feces.
Be forewarned: If you don't like cursing in your movies don't go to this one. Everyone swears, and swears heavily.
If cursing doesn't bother you, shift your brain into neutral and pony up a few bucks. You'll enjoy yourself. Just hope they don't make a sequel. One is all we need.
= new reply since forum marked as read
