Keri Russell as Sari in Cocaine Bear.Pat Redmond/Universal Pictures
Cocaine Bear
Directed by Elizabeth Banks
Written by Jimmy Warden
Starring O’Shea Jackson, Jr., Keri Russell and Alden Ehrenreich
Classification 18A; 95 minutes
Opens in theatres Feb. 24
I know the movie I wanted Cocaine Bear to be. Imagine Jaws on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas vibes with Crank momentum. But it never touches those highs. The movie, about a doped-up black bear, is a much more lethargic affair, as if the apex predator’s supply was swapped out for some Ativan.
The movie couldn’t possibly live up to its own title. The word combination “cocaine” and “bear” holds such giddy possibility – as did Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado before it – that the hijinks rolling around in your head will be a lot more fun than what director Elizabeth Banks ruffled up on screen. For the most part, her movie feels like you’re waiting around for its intended effect to kick in.
If you haven’t already heard, Cocaine Bear is inspired by a true story. In 1985, a black bear was found dead after it made a meal of a drug runner’s ditched cargo. The movie imagines an alternative adventure for the bear that should have been even more detached and wildly comical than it is.
The best Banks musters is an antic, hilarious and diabolically gruesome set piece where TikTok-famous comedian Scott Seiss arrives alongside Kahyun Kim as paramedics charging in on the bear’s carnage. Seiss gives a game, appropriately bug-eyed performance in the only elaborate sequence that sustains the manic and delirious energy this movie lacks otherwise.
The issue here is Banks attempts to cautiously elevate the film slightly above its B-movie, last bear bender premise. She gives generous consideration and screen time to a talented cast led by O’Shea Jackson Jr., despite a screenplay that doesn’t give them much material to work with. You often catch these characters twiddling their thumbs while they still have them, waiting around for the CGI cocaine bear – played by Allan Henry, a student of motion-capture master Andy Serkis – that reportedly snorted up most of the budget.
Sadly, Cocaine Bear couldn’t possibly live up to its own title.Pat Redmond/Universal Pictures
The year is 1985. Nancy Reagan’s Don’t Do Drugs PSAs are all over the tube screens. This is just a couple of years before Jackson’s father Ice Cube would join N.W.A. and write music criticizing law enforcement’s overreach during the Reagan administration’s war on drugs. There’s something potent about casting the younger Jackson here as a drug kingpin’s empathetic enforcer, even if the comedy about cocaine causing a rift between families and limbs feels more like a political shrug.
Jackson’s Daveed works for Ray Liotta’s local kingpin Syd. That’s Syd’s stash scattered across Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, so it’s on Daveed to drive out there with the former’s moping son Eddie (Han Solo’s Alden Ehrenreich), getting his Jordan 1s dirty to collect the merchandise.
Other potential prey in the woods include a detective sniffing out the coke (Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.), a park ranger in over her head (Margot Martindale), an overworked single mom (Keri Russell, wasted in this role) and the two precocious kids she goes hunting after (Christian Convery and The Florida Project’s Brooklynn Prince). The latter two could have easily carried the movie. Their eager simple curiosity and excitement when caught between cocaine and a bear whittles the movie down to its bare necessities (sorry, I couldn’t resist).
But they’re tucked away for large chunks of the movie, perhaps owing to nervousness about engaging kids too much in a coke-fuelled plot. You can sense that caution throughout the movie – a fear of aligning with the harmful Reagan campaign but also a wariness about having too much fun during an opioid crisis.
Sorry. Don’t mean to turn this fantastical premise into a downer, but we are talking about a movie that repackages the tragic story of an overdosed bear into comic material. And, sadly, it features the last completed (and merely serviceable) performance from Liotta before he passed in his sleep last May.
That’s a lot hanging over this movie, which is why Cocaine Bear is best enjoyed as something else, something completely detached, something that only exists in our imaginations.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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