“A bear did COCAINE!” screams a frazzled Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), trying to explain a patently absurd concept like a rational person – and exposing the vast capacity for humor that lies between the two. “Cocaine Bear,” a film that really puts the high in high-concept comedy, contains promise and peril in its premise. This simple, silly idea has the capacity to be as limited as a sketch or a meme … or as limitless as a dopamine rush the drug induces in the brain. Director Elizabeth Banks delivers something that sits uneasily between those two polarities – a cloud of ephemerally floating particles that’s more inconsistent than anything else.
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At its core, “Cocaine Bear” is tame enough to sit in a cage at the zoo. Rather than capitalizing on all the gonzo possibilities of a bear on blow, screenwriter Jimmy Warden’s script plays it exceedingly safe. The edgiest joke in the movie might be lifting the information about bears for its opening title cards from Wikipedia. Though the film takes its inspiration from the true-life tale of a bear who ate the missing cocaine from a drug runner’s plane crash in 1985, Warden doesn’t print the legend. Instead, he prints the studio notes. The film operates like a multi-narrative ensemble comedy, all tied together by a lurking ursine enemy. Each of these stories maps neatly onto familiar archetypes and genres, most of which feel right at home in the mid-‘80s timeframe.
Teenaged Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Henry (Christian Convery) skip school to go exploring for a waterfall in the woods. Once there, the two encounter the kind of danger that requires the former’s mom (Keri Russell) to come to hunt for them. A classic Amblin adventure, in other words. Meanwhile, drug kingpin Syd (the late Ray Liotta, getting quite the cinematic sendoff) tasks two dopey functionaries – his grief-stricken son Eddie and fixer Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) – to go hunt for the missing drugs in the forest. It’s got all the trappings of a familiar buddy comedy with two guys operating outside the law. Naturally, law enforcement is hot on their heels; if, of course, detective Bob (Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.) can figure out pet care for his beloved Maltese.
And then, for good fun, “Cocaine Bear” also has some nature tourists, woodland hooligans, and Margo Martindale as a park ranger trying to get her rocks off with an animal rights activist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). The latter element feels like a sop to the terminally online viewers who would refer to the performer as “Character Actress Margo Martindale” – and one of the few moments of glorious anarchy in this bawdy big-screen bonanza of blow and blood.
The problem is not that Banks mixes these converging storylines unevenly, a common Achilles’ heel for films that operate on multiple parallel tracks. If anything, “Cocaine Bear” could justify such big swings if it was meant to mimic its central stimulant. Instead, the film suffers because she warps them all through a bloody woodchipper, “Fargo”-style. She’s got all of the gore and the glee but none of the gravitas as all plots move deathward. Or, at the very least, towards a thriller and outright horror.
There are no “rules” to which Banks abides for the bear – and perhaps she shouldn’t, given its consumption habits. But the creature she most clearly models its presence in the movie around is the shark from “Jaws,” a presence often lurking off-screen who becomes more menacing by implication. Spielberg shot his film this way because he struggled to get his practical effects to work, though. Banks has an extensive VFX team working to animate her creature, and she’s not shy about showing it. Teasing a reveal, then flaunting it, only to go back to teasing again just cannot sustain an atmosphere of suspense. (And a CGI bear acting a bit high is funny maybe twice.)
Past a point, “Cocaine Bear” all but becomes a “Final Destination” movie that relishes in the maiming of human flesh. The most charitable explanation for the red splotches strewn across the white powdered landscape is Banks spying an equivalency between the grotesqueness of the bear maulings and the gaudiness of the humor. It plays as bawdy bloodlust, however. These miscalibrated scenes of mutilation feel genuinely mean-spirited sometimes. Especially when a minor character gets brutally killed in collateral damage from a bear attack, the lingering shot of her misshapen corpse puts a serious damper on the fun the movie so desperately wants to provide.
Nowhere is there the zeal of transgression or subversion of a stoner classic like “Pineapple Express,” to name just one recent example of a film that bakes in controlled substances to genre conventions. That bonkers energy shows up most notably in Alden Ehrenreich’s committed performance – wildly weeping over a bowl of penne pasta at a bar is exactly the level at which all the film’s other performers should be operating. But everyone else feels timid saying their lines when they should act more like they’re doing them. It’s as if they are afraid to look stupid and don’t trust the editor to find the right level. As it goes on, “Cocaine Bear” becomes far too sober an affair for its subject matter, where no amount of carnage can fully compensate for its lack of comedy. [C]