Cocaine Bear Review

Cocaine Bear was a film that blew up on the internet, or at least on Film Twitter. The question is could it live up to the online hype?

The year is 1985 and drugs are smuggled into the United States. When a smuggler’s plane suffers from mechanical failure the pilot drops his illicit cargo into Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in Georgia. In the National Park, a Black Bear finds and gets addicted to cocaine just as an array of colourful characters visit this site of natural beauty.

Cocaine Bear gained a lot of attention because of its title and premise: a bear consumes a lot of cocaine and goes on a rampage. It sounded like bonkers fun and the trailers made Cocaine Bear seem like that. But there was a risk that the internet hype does not translate into a quality film. This happened with 2006’s Snakes on a Plane which was hyped by internet fanboys and the filmmakers even changed the film based on their suggestions. I even got involved with the Twitter jokes about Cocaine Bear, saying things like ‘cinema has peaked.’

Cocaine Bear was at its best when the titular bear was on screen. It was hilarious seeing the wild animal getting high, acting crazy, and doing anything and everything it can to get more drugs. There was a lot of carnage when the bear was around, and I laughed a lot when people were mauled and shot as it was so gruesome. There was a dark edge throughout which was fun to see, like the opening when the drugs were dropped out of the plane. The bear was a relentless killing machine, like the shark in Jaws or the rogue lion in Beast. The cocaine seemed to give the bear more endurance and made it faster than the average bear.

However, the cocaine-fuelled bear wasn’t enough to sustain a feature film. It was more like a subplot in an adult animated series. It would have been a B-Plot in an American Dad or Rick and Morty episode. Some animated shows have had plots involving animals addicted to substances. King of the Hill had an episode where Hank and his gang unknowingly used crack as fish bait and in The Simpsons farm animals attacked the family because of Homer’s tomato-tobacco hybrid. There was also a little bit of South Park because of Cocaine Bear’s third-act reveal.

Cocaine Bear ended up having a sprawling story. It was like a Guy Ritchie film since it had a large cast of characters who have different agendas but were conversing to the same point. Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) were gangsters ordered to find the drugs. Isiah Whitlock Jr. played a Tennessee police detective who was also on the hunt for the drugs and to bring down the Tallgrass Mafia. Also going to the park were a couple of 13-year-olds who skip school, and the mother of one of them searched for the pair. Because of this Cocaine Bear felt disjointed because it didn’t know what story it wanted to tell. It was easy to forget a storyline was happening since characters could disappear for a long period of time. This was true for the storyline involving the search for Dee Dee (Brooklyn Prince).

The film did have a mixed message. It started with drugs PSAs from the 1980s and the bear who was addicted to cocaine. It was searching for its fix. Yet at the same time, people as well as the bear who took cocaine were able to do extraordinary feats. The film was saying drugs are bad, but they can give users superpowers. It can draw comparisons to the obscure DC character Snowflame.

Cocaine Bear was a messy and unfocused film because of the need to tell lots of stories to make up for the thin central premise, yet it managed to be bloody, funny, and bloody funny.