The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Intervention needed
It’s not that ‘Cocaine Bear’ is silly and violent — it’s that it’s addicted to underachieving
A great work of cinema has more to offer than its surface narrative; look deeper into it, and the viewer will find metaphors and themes meriting thought and discussion. ¶ Don’t look too deeply into “Cocaine Bear.” ¶ Billed as “a film by Elizabeth Banks,” this flick is exactly what the title suggests: a romp about a large animal with a whole lotta coke pumping through its system. ¶ At its heart, this is a comedy-monster movie, serving up about 90 minutes of cheap laughs and over-the-top manglings. ¶ And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Penned by Jimmy Warden, “Cocaine Bear” is “inspired by” a 1985 incident involving a wild law-enforcement-officer-turned-drug-smuggler, a plane crash and a 175-pound black bear roaming the wilderness around Georgia’s Blood Mountain while taking
in a bunch of the powdery narcotic before dying not all that long afterward. From that inciting incident, Warden (“The Babysitter: Killer Queen”) has spun a wild story centered around a significantly larger bear with a beastly metabolism and a quickly developed drug habit.
The writing leaves a lot to be desired, but the bigger problem is that Banks — a prolific, engaging and comedically gifted actress — still is finding her way in the director’s chair with this, her third effort at the helm. (She directed 2015’s so-so “Pitch Perfect 2” and 2019’s highly disappointing “Charlie’s Angels.”)
Sure, she finds a few laughs with “Cocaine Bear,” but not nearly as many as the situation should have produced. And she struggles to juggle the movie’s needlessly bloated cast of characters.