Cocaine Bear starts with a litany of facts about bears and their propensity for violence that immediately gets undercut by the subtitle: “Source: Wikipedia”. It’s a knowing, treats-its-audience-with-respect gag that makes you feel you are in smart, safe hands (a hope fostered by the presence of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller in the credits as producers). Sadly not. For pretty much every moment after that, Elizabeth Banks’ film makes poor choices to give you constant pause for thought. The true story of a 175lb American black bear that scoffed a dumped shipment of cocaine (earning him the sobriquet ‘Pablo Escobear’) is the germ for a fantastic comedy killer-animal flick, but Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden botch the tone, conjuring something that is neither scary nor satirical, funny nor frightening. Somehow the pair have done the impossible: they’ve turned the story of an apex predator whacked out of his bonce on Charlie into a bore.
It begins with an interminable protracted opening stretch that sets up the manifold colourless characters who will come up against the under-the-influence ursine. There are two crims (O’Shea Jackson Jr, Alden Ehrenreich) sent by a trafficker (Ray Liotta, in one of his last roles) to gather the gak; a ’tec (Isiah Whitlock Jr) on their trail; a single mom (Keri Russell) looking for her daughter and the girl's friend (Brooklynn Prince, Christian Convery); a park ranger (Margo Martindale) with a thing for visiting a wildlife inspector (Jesse Tyler Ferguson); and a gang of muggers (led by Aaron Holliday) roaming the forest. Presumably, the idea is to create a Coen-esque rogues’ gallery of lowlifes and weirdos, but every character is given a writerly backstory or mannered quirk (Whitlock Jr’s cop phones his dog), or seemingly endless sub-Tarantino bants about topics ranging from the rules of 20 Questions to Jeffrey Osborne’s ’80s ballad ‘On The Wings Of Love’.
The set-pieces range from the supposedly comic to the unpleasant, never finding the sweet spot in-between.
Things don’t get much better when they run into the title star. The set-pieces range from the supposedly comic — Cocaine Bear speeding up a tree when she gets a sniff of the powder — to the unpleasant, never finding the sweet spot in-between. Banks doesn’t have a grip on, or point-of-view towards, the material, an uncertainty also present in Mark Mothersbaugh’s score, which lurches ineffectively between ’80s synth licks and horror Sturm und Drang.
It is not too big a deal that the bear looks patently CG — if it was a ridiculous romp with engaging victims you wouldn’t care — but what’s worse is she has little of the personality of a Ray Harryhausen or Stan Winston creature. A gloriously gruesome skirmish with an ambulance crew gives you a hint of the film it might have been, but Banks’ storytelling is too leaden to deliver the requisite nutty energy (no film should spend so long hanging around a gazebo). You just imagine the low-budget Roger Corman/Troma/The Asylum rip-off — ‘Blow Badger’, ‘Heroin Hedgehog’, ‘Ecstasy Aardvark’ — would be much more entertaining.
