Years ago, long before the #metoo movement, I found myself at lunch with a co-worker I didn’t know very well. Despite our relative unfamiliarity, my –for lack of a better word- companion felt comfortable in delivering the entirety of his arsenal of sexist jokes. At the time, I did not have the words to extricate myself tactfully from the situation and felt a wordless pained pleading for him to stop. My telepathic message fell on deaf ears. While perhaps not the most uncomfortable I’ve ever felt in my life (I did attend middle school, after all), it wasn’t far off.
Watching Cocaine Bear summoned a similar level of discomfort.
Boy, it sure seems like this movie ought to be fun, right? I’m certain there was a fun film within this premise. That didn’t come across here. The Cocaine Bear I saw was both failed comedy and failed horror that eventually devolved into a failed mob film. but, like my lunch years ago, it was the “comedy” that made me cringe.
First of all, the film explored the issue of what it would be like for a black bear to take cocaine. It concluded the results would be violence, aggression, and forming an addiction within roughly 2.3 seconds. As black bears have a much greater sense of smell than humans, one would imagine the furry crackhead would have no trouble locating and ingesting all of the missing drugs. But in a film like this, bears are –apparently- exactly what we want them to be whenever we need them to be it and nothing less. i.e. the bear had a great sense of smell when the script called for it and a terrible sense of smell otherwise.
Based “loosely” on a true story, Cocaine Bear is about exactly what it claims. As much as I hated the film, I cannot fault it for lack of premise achievement. A drug smuggler gleefully tosses his stash out of a small airplane hovering over the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, and proceeds to become the first of many awkward punchlines when he bangs his head getting himself out of the plane and plummets unconscious to his death.
This is, unfortunately, is exactly how the film proceeded. While the screen found humor in a bear shedding humans to pieces, a ranger aiming a gun at the bear and hitting a human target in the head, and an officer blowing two fingers off a kingpin’s flunkee, neither myself nor anybody in my theater found these moments funny. Oh, I know. Maybe you’ll like the part where two tweens peer pressure each other into consuming lethal amounts of coke. Wow. Is admitting you’ve never done coke grounds for social exclusion in middle school these days? All I can say is watching consecutive teens pop a tablespoon of raw cocaine into their mouths on, essentially, a dare, didn’t make the film any better for me.
If there’s a plot in is film it’s about a bunch of people having a bad day at a National Park thanks to one addicted 
adult bear. Many are killed in methods most foul. I think this film works best as a horror, where it simply doesn’t make sense. The death scenes are deliberately gory and sensationalistic and the monster is relentless because a bear on coke has, apparently, no limitations.
It would be hard to find this film more disappointing. Like every other opening weekend guest, I was excited to see what humor could be extracted from a bear on cocaine. What I got was a messy film that repulsed me a great deal. Then, of course, there’s the part where I voluntarily chose to watch a bad film about a bear on cocaine. The sense of personal shame mirrors that of watching a bad episode of “Beavis and Butt-Head.” One doesn’t need to be an elitist to realize there’s a ridiculously cheap and cynical form of humor here. I feel like I’ve just been ripped off by a drug dealer.
Dedicated to Ray Liotta, who died shortly after filming completed, Cocaine Bear proved, well, that’s it’s no Goodfellas. That’s about the best I can say of it.
There once was a black bear on coke
Who started dismembering folk
As the bodies all spewed
My thoughts did conclude
“I’m just not getting the joke”
Rated R, 95 Minutes
Director: Elizabeth Banks
Writer: Jimmy Warden
Genre: Movies that eventually become guilty pleasures. Very guilty pleasures
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The kind of co-worker who jokes about how funny it would be to kill your boss.
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Anybody with taste
