In the opening scene of Cocaine Bear, we meet a Scandinavian couple on a hiking trip to scenic Chattahoochee, Georgia. Blood Mountain, to be more precise. Sprawling lazily on the grass, clad in white like refugees from Midsommar, they’re a perfect picture of obliviousness: fit, happy, heavily accented, without a care in the world. They even start talking about their hypothetical unborn child who, for some reason, the father wants to name “Texas.” Sure, why not. Enter the title character, who makes short, bloody work of one of them while the other watches in horror.
It might seem pointless to ask about the point of this scene, which is as logical an overture to a movie called Cocaine Bear as any. (“That bear looks demented,” observes one of the victims-to-be as the drug-addled critter humps a tree.) But there’s something about the tone here that’s genuinely off-putting—a mix of brutal, R-rated violence and sarcastic detachment that makes it hard to tell what the gag is supposed to be, or at whose expense. In lieu of being recognizably scary, or funny, or subversive—or in any way “true,” as per the film’s stranger-than-fiction premise—it’s just sloppy and misanthropic: a harbinger, unfortunately, of things to come.
Cocaine Bear is based—very loosely—on a true story, and its title is not a metaphor. In 1985, a black bear was discovered dead in Georgia clinging to a duffel bag worth of mislaid coke. It was subsequently stuffed and sold at a pawn shop to country star Waylon Jennings en route to becoming transformed into a shopping-mall attraction in Kentucky. A movie about the taxidermy process might honestly have been funnier, or at least more educational. It also might have had a bit more emotional gravitas—or at least a song or two by Waylon Jennings.
As it is, the film is directed by Elizabeth Banks, a supremely gifted comic actress whose last directorial effort, 2019’s Kristen Stewart–led reboot of Charlie’s Angels, became a flashpoint for discussions of sexism in contemporary American filmmaking. Reeling from the film’s poor opening-weekend box office, Banks talked about misleading marketing and double standards among audiences and critics when it came to genre cinema. “If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies,” she told IndieWire. An ensemble comedy led by a photorealistic CGI animal and sold as a hard-R gross-out (which it justifies), Cocaine Bear is poised to do significantly better business than Charlie’s Angels, and on a smaller budget. When it comes to theatrical releases, you have to pick your spots, and Banks’s film is being released at exactly the right time of year, in the dead zone between prestige season and the Academy Awards, when audiences have had their fill of “real” movies and hanker—like a munchies-stricken black bear—for garbage (or blood). But regardless of whether it succeeds—or whether said success proves its director’s point about what kinds of movies are allowed to break through and why—Cocaine Bear is still, at best, a frustrating, grueling viewing experience. It’s the lazy, pandering handiwork of a filmmaker who’s trying to have her satire and maul it too.
It should be said that Snakes on a Plane tried this double-dealing shtick already, nearly 20 years ago, leaning into the deadpan disposability of so much early 2000s internet comedy culture while trying to score some larger point about high-concept moviemaking. By having no less than Samuel L. Jackson—an avatar (and onscreen casualty) not only of Jurassic Park, but Deep Blue Sea—presiding over the carnage, Snakes on a Plane was trying to be something like an A-plus B-movie. But for the most part the humor barely bobbed above C-level: As Mystery Science Theater showed us, it’s easier (and more cost-effective) to riff on authentic trash than to try to make something deliberately “terrible.” That the movie was packaged as cynically and synergistically as any real franchise tentpole—complete with a faux-ironic, Top-40-baiting theme song by [checks notes] Cobra Starship—worked against the revenge-of-the-nerds subtext. At least 2013’s Sharknado had the good grace to be made for television.
Cocaine Bear makes Sharknado look like Tremors, and it makes Snakes on a Plane look like Citizen Kane. Your mileage may vary, but for survivors of early 2000s internet comedy—the era of eBaum’s World and the Star Wars lightsaber kid—it’s like a traumatic flashback, or like being force-fed an entire package of Epic Bacon. In an interview with Variety, Cocaine Bear’s screenwriter, Jimmy Warden, acknowledged his desire to take reality and warp it beyond recognition. “[It’s] my twisted fantasy of what I wish actually happened after the bear did all that cocaine,” he explained, forgetting that referring to one’s own work as a twisted fantasy is usually not a good idea. He also added that he never thought that his script was going to get made in anything like its original form. “At a certain point you cross the line,” he said, “and it becomes so messed up that you can’t help but laugh.”
There are one or two scenes in Cocaine Bear that vindicate Warden’s ambitions. The moment when a couple of prepubescent kids dare each other to literally eat a tablespoon’s worth of blow is in enjoyably bad taste, and as a single-dad drug dealer forced onto Blood Mountain to retrieve his boss’s lost wares, the ever-underrated Alden Ehrenreich reads his (lousy) lines in ways that unlock unexpected levels of humor and pathos. But more shocking than the omnipresent blood spatter and brain matter is how Banks takes actors who are usually terrific—like Isiah Whitlock Jr. or Margo Martindale—and strands them in a no-man’s-land. As a single mom worried that her daughter has been reduced to bear food, Keri Russell seems less anguished about the narrative situation than the fact that she’s taken a role in Cocaine Bear; as a slimy drug lord, Ray Liotta (to whom the film is sweetly dedicated) is on check-cashing autopilot.
In scene after scene, Banks takes the path of least resistance, piling on power-ballad needle drops and I-Love-the-’80s ephemera as if these things were a priori hilarious. But to make an unfair comparison, the difference between Cocaine Bear and, say, Wet Hot American Summer—which costarred Banks as one of its tonsil-hockey-playing summer camp counselors—is that the latter never acts like it’s above the clichés it’s stringing together. David Wain’s cult classic is generally (and genuinely) affectionate about the horndog summer-camp genre, and those good vibes are what let it go to truly absurd places—like the “going to town” montage, which is basically the same joke as Cocaine Bear, minus the bear. For material like Warden’s to work as anything more substantial than a red-band trailer, it’s important to balance affection with contempt. Cocaine Bear doesn’t, and after a while it ends up crossing a different line than intended: from watchable to not.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
Adam Nayman
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