Cocaine Bear (2023) Review

It’s hard to not be drawn by the inherent absurdity of Cocaine Bear, a film that, much like its titular character, charges headfirst into chaos with reckless abandon. Directed by Elizabeth Banks, this action-horror-comedy hybrid takes a kernel of truth – the story of a bear who ingested a large quantity of cocaine in 1985 – and spins it into a high-energy bloodbath, replete with severed limbs, mauling, and a bear behaving in ways that defy both nature and, in some cases, CGI physics. But for all its lurid appeal and promise of midnight-movie mayhem, Cocaine Bear struggles to sustain its manic energy across an entire feature-length runtime, leaving it more of a party trick than a cult classic.

A drug smuggler drops a shipment of cocaine over a national park, and a black bear finds itself consuming vast amounts of it. What follows is a string of intertwining storylines populated by a game cast, including Keri Russell as a mother searching for her lost daughter, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich as mismatched drug dealers, and the late Ray Liotta in one of his final roles as a crime boss seeking to recover his product. There are park rangers, hikers, and various unfortunate passersby, all of whom find themselves at the mercy of an apex predator now fuelled by Class A stimulants. It’s a premise brimming with chaotic potential, yet much of the film is spent diverting away from its central attraction, the bear.

When Cocaine Bear does focus on its monstrous mascot, the results are a mix of mildly amusing and disappointingly uninspired. There are moments that hit the right note of grotesque hilarity, such as an ambulance chase that might be the highlight of the entire film – brutal, ridiculous, and punctuated by a gleefully over-the-top sense of physics-defying carnage. Banks, to her credit, never shies away from the bloodshed, delivering a surprising level of gore that recalls the gleeful splatter-fests of Evil Dead II or Piranha 3D. But the laughs are inconsistent, and the film’s tonal swings between macabre slapstick and oddly earnest character beats create a sense of imbalance.

Perhaps the biggest issue with Cocaine Bear is that it stretches its thin premise too far. The film struggles to justify its own runtime, meandering through subplots that feel like filler while sidelining the one thing audiences came to see: the bear wreaking havoc. It flirts with a potential Snakes on a Plane-style self-awareness but never fully embraces the lunacy. And while the cast do their best (Margot Martindale as a trigger-happy ranger is a highlight) the screenplay doesn’t give them enough material to elevate the comedy beyond surface-level amusement.

Cocaine Bear is neither a total misfire nor the cult classic it aspires to be. There’s entertainment to be found in its sheer absurdity, and those in the right frame of mind will revel in its carnage. But like the bear itself, the film suffers from an unsustainable high – fun in bursts, but exhausting when stretched too thin.

Movie Rating:

Cocaine Bear trailer