Cocaine Bear Review
The funny anecdote turned full movie is finally here. Based on the crazy true story about a black bear who ate an undetermined amount of cocaine that was dropped from an airplane.
Convicted drug smuggler Andrew Thorton jumped out of a plane after dropping several duffle bags of cocaine. His parachute did not open and he was pronounced dead on the scene with a 15-pound duffle bag of cocaine on him.
The true story can be read here on Variety. Not surprisingly the true story is less juicy than the movie’s somewhat convoluted plot is. The film opens with this true event, which is one of the film's better parts.
From there the film follows multiple people/sets of people as they encounter the bear for one reason or another. Keri Russell is looking for her daughter who ditched school with a friend to go look for a waterfall in the national park.
O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, and Ray Liotta are the drug dealers who need to get the cocaine back or else the cartel will come after their families.
Margot Martindale is the park ranger on duty as all of this transpires, plus some punk teens and a couple doing a day hike in the park. And a police detective who has been hunting Ray Liotta’s character. All of which leads to the first major problem with the film.
There are too many storylines convoluting this simple premise. Not only are we following about 15 different people, but each of these characters is going through their own stuff.
Alden’s character is a widower who is the son of Ray Liotta and Alden has a son who he needs to get home to. It’s all so much, and at the same time, none of it is fleshed out.
So, we have characters we don’t really care about, and then they almost all die in horribly gruesome ways. Which is fine, I am a fan of gore, but when I don’t care about the people it is happening to, when I should, that’s a problem.
Which is the other issue with the film. It wants to be a violent gory horror film, but at the same time it wants to be a hard R comedy, and it does not do either well.
Maybe if the jokes landed better the tonal shifts would’ve worked. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is a good hard R horror/comedy, it can be done. So maybe the issue is Elizabeth Banks.
I love Banks as an actor, I think she is a comedic genius and always makes me laugh when she is on screen. She has like five minutes of screentime in Magic Mike XXL and makes every second count.
But she doesn’t seem to have the chops behind the camera, some of that might be due to the projects being brought to her. She did not write this film so not all of the blame should be placed at her feet.
There are a few good sequences here, one particularly nasty scene with the park ranger and a couple of EMTs, but the ending punchline falls flat (literally) taking all the air out of the scene.
This is what happens when a funny two-sentence story is turned into a 90-minute film. This probably was never going to work because it’s a crazy anecdote. Not a feature-length film worth story.
Bill Hader was right to not do a Stefon movie because that character works better in short bursts. He’s not a character that has enough depth for a full film.
Unfortunately, that is what happened here. Someone pitched the title and then they wrote the script. Maybe there is a good movie in here but, I think this idea was doomed from the start.
2.5/5 Stars
