Sunday, March 05, 2023

Cocaine Bear

 So: back in the 80s a plane had to jettison a bunch of plastic containers of cocaine over the Georgia wilderness. A bear got its paws on it and consumed a hell of a lot, and soon died of overdose. It was dubbed Pablo Escobear and Cokey the Bear by the media, which was in fine punning form those days.

  And... that's it, that's the whole story. 'Based on true events' is maybe a stretch, then, for a movie that chronicles Cokie's fictional drug-fuelled rampage across the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest. But that's fine; one of the movie's considerable charms is that it doesn't give a fuck about propriety; it's a gleefully amoral tale that manages to clear the (very low) bar set by gimmick movies by nailing the gimmick, with some bonus points for displaying a very enjoyable mean streak. Yes, it's a lot better than Snakes on a Plane. Not that that's saying much, but still.


 It's not all smooth sailing. A lot of the film's humor is character based, with such gems as sensitive man that keeps crying all the time (Alden Ehrenreich) or unattractive older people flirting and trying to get it on (Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Margo Martindale; Martindale, always a welcome presence, is so good that she almost pulls it off.)
 And so on. Some of these are fun - like when two middle schoolers dare each other to try the cocaine and end up eating it as if it was sugar, or when a bunch of yokel petty criminals pick a fight with someone they really shouldn't; But the script keeps throwing 'wacky' traits and situations at the characters with no real payoff. It's all a bit too broad, too precious and... well, mostly not funny at all.

 So all these characters converge on the park for different reasons: the two kids are there because one of them wants to paint a waterfall (it's explained, a little, but seriously... this script!) A young nurse (Keri Russell) is there because she's one of the kids' mom, and she enlists Martindale's ranger and her crush to help on the search. Then you get a couple of mobsters sent to recover the drugs (Ehrenreich and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) by their boss (Ray Liotta, in one of his last completed roles) who's too hands-on to stay away from the action, a couple police officers, some paramedics, the trio of yokel teen delinquents, and some hitchhikers to bulk up the body count.

 There's not much of a plot here: the nurse is looking for her kid, the mobsters are looking for the drugs, a cop is looking for the mobsters, and all the while the C-bear is going around killing everyone as she hunts for more coke. That's it. Everyone gets given a reason to be there, but incident does not necessarily equal either story or drama, or in this case, comedy. Luckily for us, while the script mostly fails in making these assorted goofballs funny it does succeed in giving the bear a lot of screentime, and that's where the movie shines.
 You can tell they spent a sizeable part of their budget on Bear-dward SNOW-den, and rightly so; She's a brilliant WETA creation that's both scary and pretty damn funny. And the script lives up to its brilliant/dumbass premise whenever she's on, having her [SPOILERS!] do a line of coke off a severed limb or be resurrected, Popeye-like, when a cocaine packet shatters and sprinkles her with magic dust. Or just by having her zip around like greased lightning whenever she detects cocaine anywhere.

 I was a little worried about the gore, as the first few deaths are pretty tame, with maybe the oddly bloodless severed limb (I hate that!) But pretty soon there's a very chunky headsplosion, and most deaths after that are a lot better. Director Elizabeth Banks (a well-known actress who's been on a shit-ton of movies in the last twenty years) does great by the material, injecting a lot of energy into the proceeds even when the script hangs her out to dry.

 Most of the movie's missteps (IE, the non-ursine comedy bits) are front-loaded; It gets a whole lot better as soon as the bear is given more to do. It's not going to blow (ha!) anyone's mind, but god knows they could have half-assed it and they didn't. It does exactly what it says in the tin, and thankfully it doesn't just call it a day there.

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