"Cocaine Bear" delivers exactly what it says on the package

Cocaine Bear (2023)

Inspired by true events, “Cocaine Bear” is about, well, a black bear that ingested a lot of cocaine, of course. In real life, the so-called “Cokey the Bear,” or “Pablo Eskobear,” actually died of an overdose, but good thing she doesn’t in the movie. Or, we’d have no movie. Elizabeth Banks, however, owns her previous box-office failure—2019’s unfairly maligned “Charlie’s Angels” reboot—by directing this ridiculous yet earnestly played creature feature as a character mosaic. “Cocaine Bear” has one hell of a premise, and it’s the kind of movie that does exactly what it says on the package. Yes, it’s a natural high.

Set in 1985 in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, the film begins with a drug dealer (Matthew Rhys) failing to parachute safely out of a plane after dumping more than 70 pounds of cocaine in duffle bags. An unsuspecting Norwegian couple hiking on Blood Mountain is the first to meet the coked-up black bear after she happily indulges in the abandoned narcotics. From there, it’s basically an eclectic cast playing an eclectic group of colorful characters. There’s a drug dealer (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and his boss’ grieving son (Alden Ehrenreich) who are asked to retrieve the cocaine-filled duffle bag for drug tycoon Syd (the late Ray Liotta, in one of his final roles). A Kentucky police detective (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) has a hunch on where Syd is going and goes out of his jurisdiction, not before giving his beloved fluffy dog to his partner (Ayoola Smart). An overworked nurse (Keri Russell) goes looking for her 13-year-old daughter (Brooklyn Prince) who played hooky from school and went into the woods with her friend (Christian Convery). Also in the margins, there’s a randy park ranger (Margo Martindale) and a wildlife inspector (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, in a terrible wig), and an obnoxious teenage gang of delinquents always causing trouble in the forest. 

Tonally, Elizabeth Banks’ film almost plays like Jim Jamusch’s amusingly oddball “The Dead Don’t Die” — just get rid of the zombies and add a cocaine bear. Each of the actors gamely squeezes fun character work out of these archetypes from screenwriter Jimmy Warden (2020’s “The Babysitter: Killer Queen”), while filling out the era-appropriate costume design. Alden Ehrenreich is actually giving an unexpectedly sensitive performance here, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. has one of the more endearing characters to work with and an actual arc. The bear, herself, is photorealistic enough; it’s not Yogi Bear and it’s not the subject of a National Geographic documentary. Banks worked with a stunt person, a “bear performer” named Allan Henry (who has a long history of working with performance-capture genius Andy Serkis), and Wētā Workshop (the same New Zealand prop and visual effects company used in Peter Jackson’s trilogies of both “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit”), and it’s a pretty seamless blend.

Without taking itself seriously or striving to do more, “Cocaine Bear” delivers the goods in the unpretentious form of gasps, gore gags, and giggles. We’re not exactly here for the drug PSA (though there is an era-appropriate “this is your brain on drugs” commercial). In spite of a jarring editing choice late in the film (where one non-character’s death is mentioned in a flashback), Elizabeth Banks directs this material better than she needed to, frankly. She doesn’t always have a handle on the pacing, which admittedly feels draggy even when bouncing between this disparate array of characters, but Mark Mothersbaugh’s ‘80s-style synth score gives it a jolt of momentum. “Cocaine Bear” doesn’t quite reach the outrageous cinematic high of a “Snakes on a Plane” or “Piranha 3D.” It does come close, however, in a suspenseful and gnarly ambulance chase cued to Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough.” Genre lovers will still get a kick out of the movie we got. 

Grade: B

Universal Pictures released “Cocaine Bear” (95 min.) in theaters on February 24, 2023.