Cocaine Bear (2023)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Bite Lines

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Sporting no doubt what will be the best title of the year, Cocaine Bear is as bonkers as it sounds, but it's not totally unhinged. It's not reckless. It has a control, and a rhythm, to it. To tell the truth, I'm not sure if it would have been funnier if it had been more totally deranged (Duck Soup-style), or if it would have grown tiresome that way, say, Bullet Train did. Cocaine Bear is the feature directing debut of Elizabeth Banks, and it seems to pulse with her sharp, wicked sense of humor. It goes for the throat, but it has shape, and it has characters that make us want to keep paying attention.

It begins with a bang, in 1985, as a high af man who could be related to Bradley Cooper's Licorice Pizza character (and played by Matthew Rhys) rocks out and drops duffel bags full of cocaine out of a biplane, before knocking himself out and plunging to his death. Then we get the obligatory hiking couple (Hannah Hoekstra and Kristoffer), on vacation in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, who first come upon the high af bear.

Later, teen Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her pal Henry (Christian Convery) ditch school to hike into the woods to find a beautiful waterfall and paint a picture of it. They stumble upon a few bags of dumped cocaine, and then the bear. Dee Dee's mother, Sari (Keri Russell), heads into the woods to find them. A ranger (Margo Martindale), who is dealing with a trio of teen thugs loose in the park, goes with her crush Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), to check on park safety regulations.

Meanwhile, on orders from scary crime boss Syd (Ray Liotta), drug dealer Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) and his best pal Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) also head to the park to try and secure most, if not all, of the dumped drugs. Eddie, Syd's son, is distraught over his lost love and claims to have quit his life of crime. While hiking to find a stashed satchel, he winds up pouring his heart out to one of the teen thugs (Aaron Holliday), who, not much earlier, jumped Daveed and stabbed him in a men's room. (Daveed is nonplussed by this new friendship.) Finally, Detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) is on the trail of the drug dealers.

Banks, working from a screenplay by Jimmy Warden (The Babysitter: Killer Queen), gets laughs from the interactions and byplay of these comedic characters, who are given small moments to establish at least some definitions of personality.

But the even bigger laughs come from the sudden, bizarre slayings committed by the killer bear. The more unexpected and ferocious the killings are, the bigger the laughs, which is a strange effect. But it touches something primal. The bear is a force of pure energy, corrupted but indiscriminate. He's not even evil. He's just there. The humans who die may or may not deserve it. We could easily be shocked silent by these events, but laughter is also an honest human reaction to extreme stress (albeit a weird one), and Banks balances the tone just right to encourage it. We may feel odd laughing, but… it's OK. We're in a safe space.

"Safe space" is certainly a strange way to describe Cocaine Bear, especially when death is real but using cocaine has no repercussions (except for the airplane guy). I believe it was George Carlin who once said, "What does cocaine make you feel like? It makes you feel like doing some more cocaine," and the bear demonstrates that here. It is easily distracted from killing by more cocaine, and whenever it gets tired or gets knocked down, more cocaine does the trick.

The best way to look at this thing is as a huge dark comedy. It's an absurd situation — claiming to be based on a true story, although the true story is significantly less funny — and, despite the constructed screenplay, things happen more or less at random. It's perhaps this randomness that is the funniest thing. If we consider our own mortality through a Cocaine Bear-type lens, that standing in the wrong doorway or being stuck on top of a gazebo may be our final moments, the only response is to laugh.