Cocaine Bear (Universal, 2023)

Cocaine Bear is a bad movie, granted. But it's not even a good bad movie. It is -- for lack of any other way to put it -- a bad bad movie. Meaning, it doesn't even live up to it's job of being a gaudy, terrible, exploitation film. It suffers too much from being too tame, having weak sub-plots, and trying too hard to be a real film.

Here are my basic thoughts (*spoiler alerts, blah blah blah**):

1.) If you're going to make an exploitation film -- i.e. one that unabashedly relies on violence, sex, or some other taboo content to put asses in seats -- then you make it as outlandishly crazy, violent, or erotically-charged as you possibly can. You certainly don't put a wholesome, feel-good, "mom has lost her kids" plot at the dead-center of it, unless you're going to make the mom a gun- or chainsaw-wielding badass hell-bent on revenge (or whatever). 

One of the two or three pillars of this film's plot is that Keri Russell (I don't even think her character has a name in the movie other than "Mom") is an over-worked single mom whose adventurous little girl has skipped school and run away with her friend to the woods on the exact day -- unfortunately -- that the cocaine bear is running rampant. That's all well and good, but the search for her is about as exciting as a solo game of Parcheesi, even when they find each other end end up underneath a waterfall facing both the bad guys and the cocaine bear. 

2.) There wasn't enough (or any) nudity or sex. This is a Rated R film called Cocaine Bear, for Pete's sake. This is not entertainment for kids. We're grown adults (for the most part) who came to the theater after a hard day's work, paid too much for our seats and too much for our popcorn, so that we could be blown away. Let's have some naughtiness, in some form, or else it just -- again, breaking the cardinal rule of a self-consciously bad fun movie -- risks being too tame and too sincere. 

3.) The kids do cocaine (or at least attempt to). We already know how I feel about the "kid plot" in this movie. It was boring and didn't belong here. But, furthermore, at one point the kids, who are maybe nine or 10, find some cocaine and attempt to try some. Thankfully, their attempt doesn't get very far. But I found this absolutely obscene. I do not want to see 10 year old kids dabbling with drugs that could kill them, any more than I want to see them handling loaded firearms. In fact, once again, the kids just did not belong in this film. 

4.) The plot is poorly explained. It's hard to mess up "a bear does cocaine and terrorizes people" but somehow they did. The movie starts out with a guy throwing duffel bags of cocaine seemingly at random out of a small cargo plane that's going down. Having read and watched some books and documentaries about drug trafficking in my time, I've got some huge problems with this. 

Drug traffickers don't just indiscriminately toss the bags of coke out into the woods or the ocean or wherever, without some kind of tracking device. We're talking about thousands of acres of open forest here. Maybe -- and again here the plot is extremely fuzzy -- the guy who was doing the tossing had a tracking device (spoiler alert: he dies before he can find the goods), but we aren't even given the courtesy of finding that out. 

In fact, the only "data dumps" in this film are mumbled by Ray Liotta way too quickly and unintelligibly and then way too late to matter. There's a moment -- late in the film -- when we learn that Liotta's character (who cares what his name was) might be in some serious mortal trouble if the cocaine isn't found. At this point we almost start to care about some element of this plot (after all, we know the little girl isn't gonna die...come on) because there's a ticking time bomb type situation...along with a menacing, 800 lb. cocaine-crazed bear. 

5.) What was good about this film? Keri Russell is great, despite the fact that her plotline is a bit sappy. In fact, they should have scrapped the cocaine bear part and made a film about Keri Russell as a single mom looking for love. As is, we get plenty of Keri Russell screen time, which is a huge bright spot in this film cause she is and has always been great to look at. 

Ray Liotta R.I.P. and not just cause he gets mauled by the cocaine bear. One of the all-time greats appearing, posthumously, in what I would guess is the last film he ever worked on. I wish it had been something a little better, but what can you do. It was cool to see him in action one last time.

The "Angry Retail Guy," aka comedian Scott Seiss, from Instagram/TikTok makes an appearance as a paramedic who arrives on the scene of one of cocaine bear's rampages. Whether or not it's the first of many and launches his feature film acting career, I kind of doubt. But good for him.

Oh yeah...the cocaine bear and all. Again, I don't know how you make a cocaine bear seem yawn-worthy but, other than some good old fashioned gore -- the one thing this movie actually did do enough of, and get right -- they seem to have succeeded. 

Elizabeth Banks, who directed this film, and Jimmy Warden, who wrote it, need to watch more Tarantino films and more 80s slasher flicks, and take better notes.