Cocaine Bear (2023).

I got a very testy email from someone last week after my end of the year show. The email reads, “Didn’t even need to listen to the full end of the year episode to know you have no taste in film, but hearing that you thought Banshees of Inishirin was boring just confirms it. Stick to Michael Bay films and dreck like Cocaine Bear and leave the intellectual films to the rest of us.”

So…uh…on to this week’s featured review of Cocaine Bear.

Cocaine Bear is based on a true story…but that’s stretching the definition of “true story” a lot. We’re talking like one rung above Fargo here. So what actually happened started with a guy named Andrew Thornton. He was a paratrooper for the army in the 60’s and then he was a police officer who ended up earning a law degree and became a member of the Kentucky Drug Enforcement Administration. Now, who knows where things went wrong for this dude, but something about the lifestyle he was working to prosecute enticed him, because he left the legal life to begin work as a smuggler of both weapons and drugs.

In late 1985, while on a smuggling run from Columbia, he and a buddy started chucking bags of cocaine into the Chattahoochee National Forest, and I’m guessing the plan was to retrieve them later, which seems kind of silly without trackers, but maybe I’d just be a really bad drug smuggler. Anyway, he jumped out of the plane with a duffle bag full of coke on him, got caught in his chute somehow, and smashed dead in the driveway of a guy in Knoxville, Tennessee with Gucci loafers, a bullet proof vest (should have worn a fall proof vest), and about 15 million dollars in cocaine and $4,500 cash on him. Now, back in Chattahoochee forest, a black bear found a bag of that cocaine and ate it, dying from an overdose almost instantly.

This film is like a reimagining of the second half of that story. What if the bear ate the cocaine, but instead of dying, got real savage and developed both a thirst for blood and an addiction to the stuff. Now, based on the meme title alone, you should probably know if you’re going to have fun with this or not. This is obviously not high art, and was made with a total ‘Snakes on a Plane’ vibe. The film cuts between various characters in outfits that say, “LOOK, it’s 1985!” as they both dodge the bear and, in some cases, each other. The ‘heart’ of the film, if you can call it that, is the story of a mother who’s daughter and her friend have gone missing in the forest. Then there’s the comic relief story, which features a park ranger, a nature guide who she fawns over, and some thugs who just kind of hang out in the park. And finally, there’s a group of criminals who are out to retrieve the cocaine and the law enforcement agent who’s trying to apprehend them. As expected, sometimes these stories converge, but it’s pretty inconsequential.

The movie has a real great cast of character actors, starting with an Americans reunion. Keri Russell plays the mom who’s daughter is missing, the always amazing Margot Martindale plays the park ranger (who really steals the show, she’s great in this), and Matthew Rhys plays the guy who drops the coke and dies in the driveway in a blink and you’ll miss it role for him. We also get a mini-Modern Family reunion of sorts, as Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Mitch) is in the film, directed by Elizabeth Banks, who was a character in Modern Family as well. Alden Ehrenreich, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and Ray Liotta in his last on-screen role play the guys trying to get the cocaine back and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Clay Davis from The Wire) plays the guy trying to arrest them. It’s a really solid cast.

As for the film as a whole, it was…fine. The good first - the film starts with an obvious nod to Wet Hot American Summer, which got a pop from me. The film is pretty gory for a mainstream non-horror B-movie, complete with holes in heads, limbs getting ripped off, and an absolutely killer sequence where the bear is chasing a loaded ambulance down the mountain. That sequence is a very fun sequence, but in terms of fun, the film kind of peaks there. Unfortunately the film is not as funny as it could have been with some better writing, aside from Margo Martindale. The ending also felt rushed and lacked a satisfying climax. The editing was also quite bizarre, and there’s no better way to highlight this than by mentioning “the hiker”. There’s a hiker that shows up a few times during the film, and there’s an odd, obviously ADR’d moment when a group of people is headed towards the bear’s cave, and someone says, “We know what this bear can do, remember that hiker we saw back there?” and then it kind of flashes back to them walking by a face with the skin ripped off, and then it just jumps back to the present. It felt like a skit from Family Guy and was REALLY odd. I mean, it was so quick and jarring that I’m not even sure it’s that same hiker I’m referring to, but I can only assume it was since we don’t see him again in the film. Since then, Elizabeth Banks has said that his death was filmed, but was excised because it was either too gory and mean-spirited, so maybe it’ll be on the Blu-ray. Either way, it was super weird.

Anyway, something that someone wrote online made me think a bit - they wrote, “Is the success of cocaine bear bad for everyone? Sure, it is “original.” but it’s like a sketch from snl stretched to feature length, and a movie that is based on a goofy story…I don’t know man. Audiences are terrible, and the lesson Hollywood will pay itself on the back for with this isn’t “less remakes and existing IP” but maybe more “if our title is joke, maybe we won’t have to spend money on marketing. and if our title explains the premise, maybe we don’t need to spend a lot of time on writing on development.”