{"id":611842,"date":"2023-02-25T08:48:51","date_gmt":"2023-02-25T14:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/25\/cocaine-bear-is-a-buzz-kill\/"},"modified":"2023-02-25T08:48:51","modified_gmt":"2023-02-25T14:48:51","slug":"cocaine-bear-is-a-buzz-kill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/25\/cocaine-bear-is-a-buzz-kill\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Cocaine Bear’ Is a Buzz Kill"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cocaine Bear<\/span><\/em>, a film that sounds like it was dreamed up between bong hits, arrives in theaters today. Like\u00a0Eight Legged Freaks<\/em>,\u00a0Snakes on a Plane,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Sharknado<\/em>\u00a0before it, the premise fits squarely into the \u201canimals behaving badly\u201d subgenre of\u00a0elevator-pitch movies<\/a>. Based on the title and the tagline\u2014\u201cApex predator, high on cocaine, out of its mind\u201d\u2014you know what you\u2019re getting when you buy a ticket. And\u00a0who wouldn\u2019t want to see<\/a> a bear on a drug-fueled rampage? It\u2019s an easy sell.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately,\u00a0Cocaine Bear<\/em> is not good, and not even in a \u201cstill worth watching intoxicated\u201d way. The film just doesn\u2019t land right, and you can\u2019t help but feel that it was manufactured just to be chopped up for a viral YouTube trailer.<\/p>\n

The movie is \u201cinspired by real events\u201d in the same way that the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is inspired by real marshmallows. The true cocaine bear, which roamed the Georgia mountains until one fateful day in 1985, was of the American Black variety, weighing in at 175 pounds. The story goes that a police officer-turned-drug smuggler hurled several duffle bags of cocaine from a plane and then met his own demise while trying to parachute from the craft himself. The bear that discovered one of his cocaine care packages was found dead three months later with nearly 4 grams in its bloodstream and its stomach \u201cpacked to the brim<\/a>\u201d with the white stuff. Following the incident, the bear was stuffed and displayed in the wonderfully named Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington. The mall dubbed the creature \u201ccocaine bear\u201d in 2015.<\/p>\n

Creative liberties, fortunately, were taken for the film. This bear has a lot more fun. The movie opens on a plane zooming over the forests of Chattahoochee, Georgia, with an aviator-clad guy who cannot be anything other than an \u201980s drug dealer disco dancing and hurling red duffle bags out of the emergency door. He meets nearly the same inglorious end as his real-life counterpart, banging his head and falling out unconscious after the bags.<\/p>\n

Cocaine Bear<\/em> then cuts to an amorous pair of hikers in the woods below. They are deeply in love, harping on about their wedding and their oneness with the natural world, and therefore destined for a foul end. Sure enough, they spot and begin to take pictures of a bear, and the audience gets its first glimpse of the bristling CGI beast, coked up to its eyeballs, gyrating against a pine. Bloody limbs are soon flying through the trees.\u00a0Cocaine Bear<\/em>, you have been warned, is brutal. In the heat of the maulings, the film shifts from comic to disturbing: Intestines are exposed; heads roll.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The stage is set, then, for a cast of wacky characters to descend on Blood Mountain to retrieve the gear. You have Syd White, arch-drug dealer (played by the late Ray Liotta); his wimpy son with a penchant for plain penne pasta (played by\u00a0Solo<\/em>\u2019s Alden Ehrenreich); and Syd\u2019s deputy, Daveed, played by O\u2019Shea Jackson Jr. There is also a police detective, played by\u00a0The Wire<\/em>\u2019s Isiah Whitlock Jr., who is hot on their trail and worried about his coiffured \u201cfancy dog,\u201d Rosette. Also tempting death-by-drug-bear: a pair of kids cutting school and a concerned mother in pursuit, a park ranger and a Smokey Bear-loving wildlife man, and a gang of colorfully dressed hoodlums who patrol the woods stabbing people for loot. Some are viciously mauled, and some aren\u2019t. Then the film ends.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Viewing this cynically,\u00a0Cocaine Bear<\/em> was designed to generate algorithmic attention, like that yassified\u00a0little dance by the\u00a0M3GAN<\/em> doll<\/a>. Blending two of the internet\u2019s favorite topics\u2014animals and drugs\u2014makes it easy meme fodder. The problem is, the movie feels like a setup for a lot of online jokes but tells relatively few of its own. Any cokeheads who\u2014like stoners at a Judd Apatow flick\u2014await every knowing wink will be disappointed: These are surprisingly few and far between. More interestingly, and disappointingly, there are vague gestures to \u201980s staples like Nancy Reagan\u2019s Just Say No campaign and the famous fried egg \u201cthis is your brain on drugs\u201d commercial, but they\u2019re never thoughtfully explored, or even truly satirized.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All of this points to\u00a0Cocaine Bear<\/em>\u2019s biggest drawback: It\u2019s just not funny. Elizabeth Banks is a gifted comedic actor, and her direction elevates the banter, but bar one amusing scene where the kids assume that you eat coke by the tablespoon, the script largely falls flat. For a movie about a stimulant, there\u2019s a remarkable lack of zip; events plod along like a sober bear. The biggest laugh comes when Christian Convery screams, with big\u00a0Spring Breakers<\/em> energy, \u201cIt was fucked!\u201d You realize afterward that the best of\u00a0Cocaine Bear<\/em> came in its trailer\u2014the rest is a buzz kill.<\/p>\n

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