Cocaine Bear (2023)

Score: 4 / 5

It really doesn't get much better than a nature monster or killer animal movie for me. Sharks and cats in summer, crocodiles and spiders in autumn, and bears and wolves as spring thaws the snow. How appropriate, then, for Elizabeth Banks (of all people) to gift us with one of the most exciting entries in the subgenre in years just as March ushers in a new season. Cocaine Bear is solidly what it promises, which is to say a story in which a bear ingests a bunch of cocaine and proceeds to slaughter folks in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia. Inspired by the true story of a black bear that overdosed on cocaine in Tennessee in 1985, and was found dead in northern Georgia (but was not known to have killed anyone), this film takes the story to its goriest and most compelling extremes. Think if a rattlesnake were found in cargo on an airplane and the result was Snakes on a Plane; this movie has similar, raw popular power.

Opening with the death of a smuggler who, after sporadically dumping (and snorting) cocaine for some reason, abandons the plane and fails to open his parachute, the film introduces us to a Knoxville detective (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) who identifies his body. Meanwhile, a black bear in northern Georgia eats some cocaine and, becoming wildly aggressive, attacks two hikers. It's not clear why the cocaine was being dumped, or geographically how this all played out, but it seems that the plane had dropped one shipment in Georgia and taken off -- the real-life story goes that they switched to a smaller, lighter plane that couldn't carry the weight -- heading northwest. Thankfully, the logistics don't really matter, except to provoke more speculation and turn the case into an urban legend, which I fully expect this film will help mobilize.

A wide-ranging and eclectic cast of characters descend on the Chattahoochee National Forest with various goals and outcomes, though most run afoul of the crazed bear. St. Louis drug lord "Syd" (the late Ray Liotta in his final film role) sends two henchmen (O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich) to recover the goods before impatiently joining them. There is also a group of delinquent teenagers, a horny park ranger (Margo Martindale), and an obnoxious wildlife expert (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). A final group -- comprising a single mom (Keri Russell) searching for her young daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friend Henry (Christian Convery), who skipped school to hike the park and discovered cocaine as well as the bear. Their adventures intertwine and come to a head in the best ways, organically funny and shockingly violent, emphasizing the grotesque nature of the film.

Speaking of which, let's talk about the bear itself. For a movie monster, the Cocaine Bear isn't generally horrifying. Under the influence of drugs -- and it keeps doing more in almost every scene -- it switches dramatically from contented back-scratching to voracious bloodshed without a moment's notice. For a movie on a budget, the bear really is rendered very well on the big screen; thankfully, it was performed live in motion capture by Weta FX, with no small amount of anthropomorphizing from both the stunt performer and the animators. But even that oddly enhances the visceral terror I experienced during some of the more violent attacks, making the bear move faster and think more like a killing machine, which is really the only way movies like this work. It helps, too, that some of the best violent scenes only marginally involve the bear itself; it occasionally feels like an installment of Final Destination, where people's greed or stupidity lead to their grisly deaths or gruesome injuries.

What else is there to say? Despite its potential for pro-environmental or anti-drug messaging, Cocaine Bear doesn't really have much to say politically, preferring to just poke fun at everybody. Its cheeky, mocking tone extends even to some of the more outlandish sequences, such as the speeding ambulance chase (if you know, you know). The score and soundtrack feel perfectly in line with the already visually established tone of the film, along with costumes and production design, most notably in the park ranger's station. While the film lags a bit in the story of the mother and kids, even that plot strand pays off in the climax, which toys with cloying sentimentalism before giving us a fairly conventional ending. But by then, we're about as elevated as the bear herself, so it's okay for the film to try to ground us a bit before ending. Now let's just hope Banks decides to helm her rumored other films about animals on cocaine!