A film that delivers exactly what it promises, Cocaine Bear aims to fulfill any and all possible requests that the audience might make of it. But as much fun as its structure and tone consistently yield, the biggest joy to be found is that this is no Snakes on a Plane.
Cocaine Bear, despite the tack its marketing is taking, was never meant to be a meme (which may ultimately lead to it being even more memed), and this lets director Elizabeth Banks (Pitch Perfect 3, the vastly underrated 2019 Charlie’s Angels) and screenwriter Jimmy Warden get surprisingly weird with things. It feels like at some point during post-production, a studio executive saw what was coming together in the test screening process, and before you know it, you’ve got a parallel track happening, wherein a quirky, rough-around-the edges film gets the marketing package for something that it really isn’t, but that it could be. (Or to use an example from a few weeks back, the M3gan effect.) It’s a situation that can lead to angry audiences if the gap between those two films isn’t spannable, but if it holds, you have a genuine crossover hit.
As far as movies about fauna all jacked-up on drugs go, Cocaine Bear fulfills its most base expectations. But there are also what feels like three different movies, each unfolding in the shadow of the cocaine bear situation. There’s a family adventure film with Keri Russell, Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery (the latter getting some great lines) that can’t help colliding with some visceral gore; a caper movie involving O’Shea Jackson Jr., the late and great Ray Liotta and comic secret weapon Alden Ehrenreich (who is pure gold and should not have had to personally weather the failure of Solo); and then a frustrated rom-com of sorts between park ranger Margo Martindale and local wildlife supervisor Jesse Tyler Ferguson. But each of these strains weaves into the others, with the central bear as a chaos agent that holds everything together. It’s a roundelay of the mid-’80s southeastern United States, only rather than trading lovers, the central narrative transitional device is running from or being eaten by a bear.
Banks demonstrates a sincere love for a lot of classic drive-in cinema aesthetics, and it’s impossible to escape the sense of fun that pervades the material. Kids in danger and gory eviscerations of legendary character actors may not seem the kind of hilarious crowd-pleasing moments that they play as in the context of this film, but Banks has a gift for orchestrated mayhem that recalls Sam Raimi, and she and her cast are all committed to making the Cocaine Bear experience into something more than what audiences might have feared in the face of the shrewd and effective marketing. The fact that there were people at the advance screening already wearing Cocaine Bear T-shirts is impressive. But they could make a sequel with any or every surviving cast member and I would gladly watch all of them. Or better yet, Cocaine Bear Versus the Opioid Crisis. Watch out, Sacklers!
There’s also a lot to be said for taking a wild little anecdote about mid-’80s drug trafficking and its collision with the ursine world and turning it into the birth of a new American cryptid. It’s Cocaine Bear; she’s not The Host or Shin Godzilla, but she’s saying a lot about how the view of American exceptionalism is now setting the bar at a heroic amount of drug use that doesn’t kill us but rather makes us more ourselves. If Cocaine Bear was a drink special, it would be a multicolored Lisa Frank slushee with blood-red PGA mixed throughout.
