New Movie “Cocaine Bear” features a cocaine guzzling bear.
Courtesy | Wikimedia Commons
“Cocaine Bear” was almost a good movie. The dissonance created by realistic shots of human insides alongside dry one-liners with a 50 percent land rate can only succeed in a movie that knows what it is. This needed to be a “bad movie” with cheesy CGI, self-aware jokes, and unconvincing special effects– not an R-rated movie with unreliable humor and surprisingly nauseating shots interspersed throughout.
I wouldn’t recommend the movie by itself, however, sitting in the physical theater with an equally anticipatory and curious audience made it a worthwhile experience.
The premise of the movie is simple: 70 pounds of cocaine gets dropped off in a forest after a botched delivery, and a bear finds it. Even with a simple premise, the movie follows way too many storylines. Two kids looking for a waterfall, a mom looking for the kids, a drug dealer looking for cocaine, a detective looking for the drug dealers, delinquent teenagers looking for trouble, and a woman looking for love (I think) all find themselves face to face with this cracked out bear.
I struggled to figure out what the movie wanted to say. Once I realized this was not an anti-drug campaign after a strangely moving scene between the cocaine bear and her cubs, I decided this movie was about family. Eric, a former drug dealer who retired from working for his drug lord father, mourns the death of his wife and serves as the movie’s voice of reason in order to protect his son. Even Eric’s father proclaims that he is doing all of this for the safety of Eric and his son.
It’s a weirdly heavy undercurrent for a movie called “Cocaine Bear.”
I also had trouble placing the genre. It was not a straight comedy for the reasons just explained, but it was not a tragedy either because almost every death was followed up with some poorly delivered one-liner.
The movie also had some surprisingly beautiful shots. There was an ambulance scene that was excellently shot. There was truly compelling tension created with a heartbeat and a stethoscope. The climactic final battle-esque scene was really cool because of the setting, but I don’t think there are any real places that look like that, which is sad.
The problem is the movie needed to pick. Is this a beautiful movie about family? Is this a stupid movie about a cocaine bear? It had the potential to be really good with the latter, but with pieces of the former it just became a confusing viewing experience.
It wasn’t well-written enough to be quite self-aware, either. Sometimes I actively cringed at the screenwriting, and sometimes I genuinely laughed. Frankly, the movie could have invested the 30 million dollar budget in a better, more consistent writer and allowed the effects to be bad. Laughably bad.
All this to say, this is a movie that is worth seeing simply by virtue of it being confusing. This is an easy movie to engage with, to laugh with, to laugh at, and to cover your face when a bear starts eating someone’s intestines. This would not make a good streaming experience, so see it in theaters while it is out, even just to say that you saw it. I don’t anticipate this becoming a cult classic or critically acclaimed, but it’s the kind of thing I would trade for seven dollars and 95 minutes of my life.
