Cocaine Bear

The true story of the cocaine bear is a sad one. Back in 1985, after drug smugglers dropped around 1,320kg of cocaine into the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in northern Georgia, some of it was found by a bear, who overdosed and died. Nothing is actually known about what it got up to in the meantime. Elizabeth Banks’ film, which uses the initial premise to tell a much lighter story (albeit one which features several deaths and a substantial amount of blood), has been claimed as a sort of tribute to the legendary animal. As a fictional character, it operates in the space between monster and anti-hero in which several of the silver screen’s most celebrated creatures reside. If you don’t find the bear scary at the outset, you have failed to understand the premise. If you’re not rooting for it by the end, you haven’t been paying attention.

You don’t really need to pay a lot of attention. This isn’t high art. Seriously, though. A bear on cocaine. It should be pretty clear from the outset whether or not this is your sort of film.

The real challenge which it faces is living up to that premise. Despite a suitably violent intro (with an extra layer of humour for those who remember what star Kristofer Hivju’s Game Of Thrones character claimed about a bear), it’s too slow early on, introducing far too many boring human characters for viewers (many of whom will not be sober) to reasonably keep track of. The real life character of Andrew Thornton (played by Matthew Rhys) is lampooned mercilessly, which might amount to cruel and unusual punishment were he not already dead, and which provides the necessary ‘don’t do drugs kids’ counterbalance for the rest of the story. At least, don’t do them whilst attempting to parachute out of a Cessna over trees in the dark.

Also involved are police officers investigating the mess, gangsters trying to recover the drugs, teenagers trying to steal whatever is not nailed down, two park rangers on a date, paramedics out of their depth and a mother desperately searching for her 13-year-old daughter and the said daughter’s friend, who have gone off into the forest without permission in search of a secret waterfall. The acting is variable, so few of these characters really stand out. That said, Margo Martindale is great as a sexually frustrated ranger who owns a beaver joke as if they had never been made at women’s expense. Young Christian Convery is impressively forceful as a kid who is all out of patience with adults telling him what to do when there is a bear on cocaine to consider, and there’s a typically charismatic villainous turn from Ray Liotta, who died shortly after seeing the first cut, and to whom the film is dedicated.

We follow these characters as they stumble around the recreation area – a sizeable patch of woodland with cliffs and a river and, of course, caves – with varying degrees of purpose. The kids’ discovery of the cocaine is nicely handled, shorn of moral judgements but pleasingly realistic. The gangsters, for all that they’re thinly written, are allowed to be more than just cardboard cut-out bad guys and have concerns and responsibilities which extend beyond the immediate story. Where Banks really does well is in presenting the bear as, well, just a bear. It gets a few comedy routines which are funnier if you’ve spent time around cocaine users, but there’s no sense that it gains any special insights as a result of its experience. When we are invited to sympathise with it – or even see it as heroic – it is still behaving like an animal.

Interestingly, it is a female animal. Monsters almost always default to being male, but there’s a distinctly female-centred vibe to this film which changes the way plot, humour and individual scenes play out. Perhaps most importantly, it adds a little uncertainty to the way deaths pattern out in a story which otherwise sticks closely to formula. It is, after all, an unashamedly trashy creature feature, just made on a bigger budget and given a bigger platform than usual due to the way its premise went viral. For many viewers it will be a first venture into this sort of territory, and they should be aware that there are lots of other great creature features out there – many stronger than this one – even if one has to sift through a lot of dross to find them. For those who feel that they’ve seen it all before, it might be worth pointing out that the way it uses formula at the end is part of the joke.

It is not, ultimately, everything one might hope for from a film about a bear on cocaine, but that would be a pretty big ask. It does have some laugh out loud moments and a healthy sense of fun throughout. One never gets the sense that Banks or her production team have fallen into the trap of thinking that because it’s a silly story, it doesn’t deserve to be told with care. Whilst it may not blow you away, it will leave you on a high.

Cocaine Bear is available now on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray™, DVD and Digital Download