In December of 1985, reports surfaced of an unfortunate black bear discovered dead in Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest, surrounded by the detritus of a drug delivery from Colombia gone all the way awry.
This beast had somehow managed to munch its way through 40 containers of cocaine – totalling 40 per cent of its body weight – before the onset of multiple medical emergencies that could only result in its demise. (Just be grateful that Winnie the Pooh stopped at honey.)
Since then, the bear has found a final resting place – after its taxidermied corpse was bounced between multiple states and owners of varying degrees of legality, including a Nashville pawn shop and country singer Waylon Jennings – in a Kentucky-themed novelty store. Nicknamed Pablo Escobear and sporting a white and blue cowboy hat (Kentucky's state colours) and an explanatory placard, it now presides over the sale of so-called "blow globes", gold-plated Kentucky Fried Chicken bone necklaces and the like; a mascot of corn-fed kitsch.
Gory comedy-thriller Cocaine Bear offers a heavily revisionist take on this bizarre episode in American drug trafficking history: Writer Jimmy Warden imagines a bear whose massive cocaine consumption leads to a murderous frenzy – much to the horror of Chattahoochee staff and visitors – rather than simply renal failure and cardiac arrest.
The film exacts a Tarantino-esque vengeance on behalf of that poor old black bear – for its ugly, untimely death and for the posthumous indignity of being turned into a teddy and used to hawk silly socks and slogan tees. (It's gotten a considerable glow-up, too: The CGI version weighs in at 230 kilograms, versus the OG's measly 79.)
The project might also be understood as director Elizabeth Banks's own swing at revenge – she's necessarily on a mission to regain face after the emphatic failure of her Charlie's Angels reboot (2019).
The decision to return to directing with an aggressively high-concept, so-dumb-it's-good romp with a testosterone-revving premise seems like a calculated provocation, the statuesque comedienne putting on a baseball cap and swivelling the brim to the back, determined to prove that anything dudes can do she can do… passably.
While the final product doesn't quite achieve the steady drip of thrills one might have hoped for, and the comedy is hampered by some peculiar pacing – a recurrent and particularly baffling feature of Banks's directorial work, given the comedy chops she brings to her on-screen work – at least she didn't totally (ahem) blow it.
And if, as Banks claims, she's never actually tried the illegal substance that drives the action of the film, then surely Ray Liotta – making one of his final silver screen appearances as the tough and leathery drug lord hell-bent on recovering his unceremoniously dumped merchandise – has experience enough for the two of them, and maybe the entire ensemble cast.
Speaking of which: there's Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story), sporting double denim as Liotta's son, disillusioned with the biz but dragged into a retrieval road trip by another of his dad's employees, played by O'Shea Jackson Jr (Long Shot); they clash with a trio of sweet delinquent teens (Aaron Holliday, J.B. Moore and Leo Hanna) who've stumbled upon some of the precious bricks not yet snaffled by the apex predator.
The hullabaloo proves terribly irksome for Margo Martindale's park ranger, disrupting her own personal mission for the day: a heavily perfumed attempt to seduce a visiting animal rights activist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson).
The Florida Project's Brooklynn Prince, meanwhile, plays a kid who's ditched school for a forest expedition, accompanied by her curly-haired sidekick (Christian Convery) and eventually drawing her concerned mom, Sari – Keri Russell in a hot pink jumpsuit – into the rampaging bear's domain after her.
A nurse as well as a single mother, Sari functions as the film's voice of reason – paralleled by none other than the bear, who in this telling is a lady and a mother herself. ("How do you know it's a girl?" one character asks another, trapped beneath the heft of the tuckered-out creature. "Her vagina is on my ear," comes the reply. Gender reveals are always tacky, I guess.)
For a film that indulges in all manner of dismemberments, Cocaine Bear has got an awfully earnest undertow; Banks can't resist wedging in a message about the sanctity of motherhood.
By the same token, the film doesn't portray cocaine as being in any way fun. Of course, that makes sense if you think about this being an expensive Hollywood movie, and one set in the abstinence-obsessed 80s of Ronald Reagan and D.A.R.E.
On the other hand, you'd think that a film with a premise this outré would offer more in the way of overtly coked-up hijinks, by human as well as ursine characters. (OK, it was pretty funny when the bear inhales a fat stripe of the stuff off a severed foreleg… but even Liotta's character doesn't get to indulge!)
As the film switches between the separate storylines, you can at times feel the gears clenching – though Mark Mothersbaugh's scintillating score, with its radar pulse synths and Morricone-esque horn riffs, does much to mitigate this effect.
The Devo frontman is of no help when it comes to the dialogue, however: Many lines feel like they're suspended in too much air – even while the actual plot feels overstuffed. It's burdened with needing to manoeuvre so many characters within striking range of the bear while also wanting them all (well, the survivors) to learn a valuable life lesson about the importance of family – all in only 95 minutes!
To be clear, 95 minutes is as long as a film titled Cocaine Bear should ever be (how Snakes on a Plane got away with 106 minutes – in 2006! – is a mystery to me). It's more that Banks, much like her bear, seems to have bitten off somewhat more than she can chew.
Cocaine Bear is in cinemas now.
