The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
I had very mixed feelings go into the theater to watch Cocaine Bear, as I’m not usually a fan of what I have dubbed “meme movies.” A meme movie is something that is sold entirely on a ridiculous and/or stupid premise and is designed to trend on Twitter because idiots are calling it the dumbest movie ever made. The magnum opus of this genre is the Sharknado series, but such movies have become increasingly common as the ability to generate social media activity has eclipsed quality as the goal of the movie industry. That isn’t to say such movies never work. I love the Wolf Cop movies, for example. But for every Wolf Cop that realizes that the silly concept must be accompanied by actual writing and filmmaking, there are a dozen terrible films that make no attempt at anything beyond a silly title (take, for example, the insufferable The VelociPastor). These films are the height of cynicism, as they purposefully aim for low quality in order to generate buzz about their ineptitude from people that can’t tell the difference between genuine failure and intentional failure. I really, really hate that.
Cocaine Bear falls somewhere in the middle. Inspired by a real life incident in 1985 when a black bear did a bunch of cocaine and quickly died, the movie asks a great question: What if the bear didn’t die, but instead went on a cocaine-fueled rampage? Despite my hatred of meme movies, that is a damn fun concept. My fear, though, was that the film wouldn’t live up to the concept. As much as I’m going to sound like a cranky bastard for saying this, Cocaine Bear does not live up to its own concept, largely due to a needlessly convoluted script.
The film’s main flaw is the excessive cast of characters that prevents any characters from having enough screen time to become particularly interesting and a resulting lack of narrative focus. We have a couple of kids, the mom looking for the kids, a couple of low-level drug dealers, a high-level drug dealer looking for the low-level drug dealers, a cop, a park ranger, a nature fanatic and probably a couple of others that I’ve forgotten about, all weaving into and out of the movie for various reasons and motivations. This film could instantly be improved by deleting half of these characters and allowing the others to have time to breathe. We would often be following one group, only to switch to another group that I had forgotten were in the movie, only to switch to another group shortly thereafter. Consequently, I don’t care about any of these people and the movie lacks central characters. The gold standard of the killer animal genre is, of course, Jaws. Imagine if the crew of the Orca was only one of about six groups of characters going after the shark and we only periodically checked in with Brody, Hooper and Quint. The drama and pacing of the film would be destroyed. Maybe it’s not fair to compare Cocaine Bear to Jaws, as this certainly isn’t trying to be scary, but the same basic rules of screenwriting do apply.
Wisely, the film is in on its own joke and is much more of a comedy than a horror film. Unfortunately, it also isn’t very funny and largely relies on the inherent silliness of its concept for laughs. I laughed a couple of times (the two kids pretending that they know how to do cocaine was damn funny), but the writing isn’t clever enough to sustain the overall joke for the entirety of the running time. Ironically, the film is far gorier than many recent, watered-down horror films (I’m looking at you, Megan). There are some satisfying, intestine-ripping moments of rampaging bear action and the ambulance attack is the best sequence in the film. But since the film focuses primarily on humor and largely fails in that regard, the gore also largely falls flat. Extreme gore can oddly be a great accompaniment to humor (see Evil Dead 2 or Dead Alive, for instance), but both elements need to work in tandem more effectively than they do here.
Directed by Elizabeth Banks and made on a $35 million budget, the sheer talent and production values prevent Cocaine Bear from being confused with a SciFi Channel production. Banks is a talented director and the film looks damn good. Even the CGI bear looks better than some effects that I’ve seen in recent Marvel movies with quadruple the budget, and it certainly looks better than that ridiculous looking bear in last year’s Prey. The cast is solid and the performances work well enough, even if nobody is given enough time to do much with their character. There really is a lot of talent here that is betrayed by a screenplay that desperately needed another draft.
It’s worth noting that Cocaine Bear marks the last performance of the great Ray Liotta, who sadly died in 2022. Considering the nature of his career-making role in Goodfellas, it’s somewhat fitting for him to leave the screen battling a cocaine-snorting bear. I only wish that the film itself lived up to how incredibly fun that sounds.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Bear#/media/File:Cocaine_Bear_poster.jpg
