‘Cocaine Bear’ Movie Review: Cocaine-Fueled Bear Embraces Its ‘80s B-Movie Roots

Cocaine Bear prides itself on an outlandish concept that combines a black bear with an impossible amount of cocaine that leads to a whole lot of carnage. Elizabeth Banks steps behind the camera to bring Jimmy Warden’s screenplay to life, giving an additional gloss to this black comedy that one wouldn’t expect to see come from a major Hollywood studio.

‘Cocaine Bear’ showcases a black bear with a cocaine habit

A drug smuggling operation goes horribly wrong, resulting in cocaine pouches landing across the wilderness. The group of criminals responsible for the drugs’ transport make it their mission to track the packages down to ensure that they get all of the profit, but little do they realize, a 500-pound black bear accidentally ingested much of the cocaine and developed a habit for it.

Tourists, teenagers, and children explore the beautiful outdoors without any knowledge about what lurks in the beautiful bushes. The black bear goes on a murderous, drug-fueled rampage, leaving the surrounding humans with no choice but to fight for their survival.

An amped up apex predator hungers for blood

Cocaine Bear opens with a disclaimer on the relative tranquility of black bears and the safety precautions to sharing spaces with them, then humorously reveals its source coming from Wikipedia. It echoes such warnings in its anti-drug campaign clips of the past, as adolescent friends Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Henry (Christian Convery) joke around with the discovered cocaine after skipping school. The greatest dangers are wrapped in packages not immediately signaled as dangerous.

Warden throws together an ensemble cast of characters that all find themselves on the path of a black bear willing to attack anything it comes across. Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) are doing all they can to locate the missing cocaine for Syd (Ray Liotta). Meanwhile, Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) is smitten with Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), blinding her to the real terror that lurks in the very woods that she works in.

Each member of the ensemble cast in Cocaine Bear has their own motivation for roaming nature on this particular day. However, the black bear only yearns for more cocaine, and it’s willing to do anything to retrieve it, similar to the smugglers. All others are simply caught in the potentially fatal crossfire.

‘Cocaine Bear’ thrives in its momentary set pieces

Banks transports Cocaine Bear back to the 1980s, narratively and aesthetically. Mark Mothersbaugh’s upbeat score infuses synth and pop tunes that aim to boost the film’s comedy, rather than its horror. However, it occasionally undercuts the tone, causing the presentation to feel uneven.

This ensemble is packed with characters, not allowing any of them to breathe until the audience is suddenly expected to care about their survival in the third act. In reality, it’s difficult not to root for the bear over its human counterparts. We want to see how the bear will take them down one by one. Nevertheless, there are some fun performances that peek through, such as ones from Ehrenreich, Ferguson, and Martindale.

Cocaine Bear finds its rhythm in the drug-fueled bloodshed that mirrors ’80s slashers, but it falls flat whenever the bear isn’t the focus. There are some odd directing and editing choices made, as neither the comedy nor the film’s wild nature go quite as ball-to-the-wall as one would expect with this premise. It all boils to a climax that somehow feels less hard-hitting than the story’s midpoint.

Cocaine Bair snorts into theaters on Feb. 24.