Written by: Jimmy Warden
Starring: Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Christian Convery, Alden Ehrenreich, Brooklynn Prince
Rating: [2.5/5]
Creating a narrative around an ensemble cast provides the opportunity to assemble a large and talented cast, but in turn, presents the challenge of making each of their appearances worthwhile. Something requiring plenty of skill and some filmmakers have mastered this ability, but unfortunately, we cannot put Elizabeth Banks amongst that group seeing as it serves as the detriment of a promisingly comedic story.
In the attempts to offload some cocaine on a plane, a large shipment lands in the Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest where a bear finds it and consumes it. With many interested parties in the park, the bear becomes incredibly violent after consuming the cocaine putting everyone in the vicinity in danger.
Utilizing the real story of a bear who consumed found cocaine, this feature decided to take the obvious absurdity of it and make a movie filled with plenty of violence as this bear terrorizes everyone in its way in the forest. This in itself has the foundation for something incredibly funny and in spurts this feature certainly delivers on its promise, but when you factor in the integration of human characters, everything begins to crumble.
In the park, various people encounter this bear all with various reasons for being in its way. Some because they work there like state troopers, for enjoyment, and others on the job to retrieve all of the lost cocaine. With all of them converging into the scene with a date with a coked-up bear, none of them get nearly enough time to not only prove to have value in following but also to make an impressionable impact in the story. Thus it becomes a movie with some fun bear attack scenes with nothing else really supporting the full story.
While I don’t seek to fix movies that do not work for me, the obvious solution that may have alleviated the issue was simply a smaller cast of characters. Our attention and interest get fractured just when anything good begins to happen with these characters, which does them a disservice where I don’t care if they die by the bear. By the time the final credits roll, it proved difficult to remember anything remotely discernible about these characters other than some gaffes that occur.
One could argue the characters should not matter so much when we all really came for the bear, but someone should have shared this with the filmmakers because we spend a decent amount of time with these characters and get nothing for our efforts. It makes sense because as much as we want to focus on this bear you also cannot spend far too much time with a CGI bear before it loses its novelty and after a while just looks like a big CGI bear. This all comes back to perhaps we should not have had an inundation of characters when they carried so much importance in keeping us grounded throughout the story.
The fairly sparse use of the bear, however, does make every moment where it appears in the film impactful in quite a humorous way. Whether or not the science behind how a bear under the high of cocaine would act in this manner becomes immaterial as the number of people it can take down while in this state becomes the real game. It certainly gets quite bloody in moments while additionally reinforcing the healthy fear we should have of bears. Seriously, if not for the fur they have making them look like big cuddly creatures and the propaganda of teddy bears, we would fully understand these things are absolute monsters out there. We should consider ourselves lucky they don’t have a taste for humans seeing as how much havoc one bear can single-handedly wreak.
Cocaine Bear entered the fray with a very silly plot idea and it definitely did have some elements of fun, but it came far too sparse throughout the narrative leaving a large chunk reserved for uninteresting characters. Each of these actors tries their best with what they receive but they can only do so much when their time gets divided by far too many players in the game to something worth remembering. This leaves this feature as quite the mixed bag.
Films with Josh 
