Having been around people on cocaine, I wonder if only bears should use it.
The title character in “Cocaine Bear” makes more rational decisions than people do after sniffing Bolivian marching powder.
Director Elizabeth Banks (“Pitch Perfect 2”) and writer Jimmy Warden consistently inject “Cocaine Bear” with an appropriately unrepentantly silly tone and seem to know exactly how far to push a story involving child endangerment, grisly deaths, illicit drugs, gang warfare, bad parenting, misused firearms and a highly stimulated bear.
It also helps that Warden doesn’t rely simply on the central gimmick. The humans are interesting enough we care about whether they end up as an ursine lunch.
When drug smuggler Andrew Thonton II (Matthew Rhys, in a brief but sidesplitting performance) drops portions of a large shipment of Bogota Gold from his overloaded flight but seems to be running into trouble because he’s enjoying his merchandise a little too much.
Thornton’s story is true. Just about everything else in “Cocaine Bear” is the product of Warden’s warped imagination. The title character believes the packets are food and proceeds to tear up a national park and some of its visitors and staff thanks to that extra nasal boost.
Drug lord Syd Dentwood (Ray Liotta in one of his last roles) is furious and desperate about the lost duffel bags and sends his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and his pal Daveed (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) to retrieve as much of the coke as possible before angry Columbians hunt them down.
Apparently, they don’t know how dangerous a snowblind bear is.
Also oblivious to the peril is a detective (Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.) eager to shut down the Dentwood operation and a mother (Keri Russell, who, incidentally is married to Rhys, with whom she co-starred in the Fx series “The Americans”) trying to find her daughter (Brooklyn Prince) and her pal (Christian Convery), who have wandered into the woods without parental consent.
Adding to the potential mayhem is a park ranger (Margo Martindale, another “Americans” alum), whose marksmanship would make the NRA cry.
Unlike some of the human drug abuse films I’ve endured, the bear is weirdly sympathetic. Her relationship to cocaine resembles Popeye’s love for spinach, but when she isn’t coked out, she’s heroically saving her cubs. Unlike the shark in “Jaws,” it would be no fun if the story ended with her demise.
Sadly, that’s what happened to the real bear whose discovery of a lost drug shipment inspired this story.
Any doubts about Banks deserving to sit in the director’s chair disappear like the content of Thornton’s plane. She counterbalances the giddy, irreverent tone with action scenes that are as convincing as they are unlikely. Her (completely computer-generated) bear is both menacing and giggle inducing. Nobody would buy a ticket for a film that recounted the fate of the real bear, so it’s entertaining to watch Banks and Warden’s creation inflict dark comic mayhem.
The primary virtue of “Cocaine Bear” is that it consistently delivers the sort of amoral delights it promises.