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Cocaine Bear

This is a film heavy with 'premise buzz'; it hangs its hopes, almost singularly, on the simple combination of a bear and shitloads of cocaine. By the amount of reviews I've seen rolling through my social timelines in the last few days, I'd say it's doing the job. The poster is great, and there's one word on it that's used extremely loosely - 'INSPIRED by true events'. These true events involved drug dealers dumping around 40 containers of cocaine into the Tennessee wilderness, and a black bear eating a lot of it. The real story is way too prosaic, so a gory action comedy was scaffolded around those bare bones.

An odd, anti-drug TV spot featuring Pee-wee Herman and Nancy Reagan lets us know what tone to expect and it doesn't take its foot off the slightly tacky, weirdly endearing pedal. It has a great 80s music synthy pop soundtrack and the cast is one of the most esoteric I've seen in a long time. Keri Russell is probably the lead, along with Alden Ehrenreich (presumably, this is the kind of script he's getting after the sadly under-appreciated Solo nearly derailed his career). O'Shea Jackson Jr (son of Cube) and the angry Ikea guy, Scott Seiss appear, but also fucking Ray Liotta, in his final role! The cast alone would make this a curio, without even considering the bloodthirsty, coked up bear.

Director, Elizabeth Banks and writer, Jimmy Warden serve us a number of cracking moments of terror, relieved by splatters of blood and bone - a park ranger in a tree, the stalking of people in a park office, and my pick of the bunch, an ambulance sequence that dialed the ridiculous up to eleven. The human bits, Russell and her daughter (and her amusingly sweary friend), and Ehrenreich's reluctant crim, are fine enough, but they're really just place holders for the main event - the bear attacks (and drug use scenes).

If you're going into this film expecting anything meaningful, or hell, even anything of much quality, you might have to rethink that ticket purchase. But if your anticipation is black bear + cocaine + blood and guts = satisfying chuckles and winces, then settle in for a film that knows exactly what it is and what it offers.

Cocaine Bear is showing everywhere now.

See also:

This is similar in style to the recent Violent Night (2022), directed by Tommy Wirkola, and if you're looking for more bear films, how about Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005)?

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2023)

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