Coke and a Smile
Elizabeth Banks guides Cokey the CGI bear through a shamelessly stupid, aggressively silly comedy-thriller that has no delusions of greatness.
Cocaine bear
Director: Elizabeth Banks • Writer: Jimmy Warden
Starring: Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, Margo Martindale, O’Shea Jackson Jr, Ray Liotta, Isiah Whitlock Jr, Ayoola Smart, Kristofer Hivju, Matthew Rhys
USA • 1hr 35mins
Opens Hong Kong February 23 • III
Grade: B-
It would appear that back in the Reagan ’80s, when Nixon’s so-called War on Drugs was still raging, a cop-turned-dealer dumped a bunch of cocaine out of a plane, which a 80-odd kilogram black bear promptly ate and ODed on (poor thing). That’s the stranger than fiction true story providing the “What if…?” inspiration for Elizabeth Banks’s (Pitch Perfect 2, Charlie’s Angels) Cocaine Bear. And you know what? The title says it all. So if you’re expecting a dissection of American drug policy as the root cause of the disproportionate incarceration of Black men, its contribution to the militarisation of police forces and its hand in the erosion of Mexican-American relations look elsewhere. And despite a dash of Earth mother imagery the film has a single, three-tiered purpose: coke, carnage and comedy.
Cocaine Bear’s raison d’être is to entertain, ideally as gruesomely as possible and roll around on the goofier side of the imagination – kind of like a cokehead bear rolling around in a white dusting of blow. And while we’re at it, let’s poke fun of the Tennessee/Georgia/Kentucky neck of the woods, where guns are gods and low level Appalachian gangsters roam. When it leans into its temporal oeuvre – 1985 y’all, the days of synth-rock, Grandmaster Flash and minty green eyeshadow – and the fleshier elements of the story the modestly budgeted (US$35 million) and even more modestly timed (95 minutes, a C+ right there) Cocaine Bear is a stupid good time that makes no demands. You might feel a little dumber when you leave. If this is your jam you’re going to love it. Everyone else will roll their eyes. There’s no in between.
Those shades are magnificent
The film is structured like a very low-brow The Hateful Eight – but without the pretensions to the high-brow art of that film. As his small plane verges on crashing, coked up trafficker Andrew C Thornton II (Matthew Rhys, letting hilariously loose) tosses his million-dollar cargo into the Georgia woods below before bailing himself. His body lands (literally) in Kentucky. The drugs are in a state park on Blood Mountain. Cue the motley collection of characters that eventually converge in Georgia: single mom Sari (Rhys’s wife Keri Russell) heads to the park after her daughter Dee Dee (The Florida Project’s Brooklynn Prince) and her bestie Henry (Christian Convery) skip school to go to a waterfall; heartbroken drug dealers Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich, Solo) and his partner Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr, who’s looking more like his dad Ice Cube every day) head out to recover their merchandise and protect Eddie’s dad Syd (Ray Liotta in one of his last completed films) from a garrotting; bungling park service ranger Liz (Margo Martindale, Justifed) goes to investigate… something with her crush and PETA Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson); and a trio of dumbass “gangsters” led by Stache (Aaron Holliday) head in hoping to rob random hikers and break into Liz’s petty cash box. While they’re all in the park, Cokey, who’s quickly developed an addiction, stalks them while on her quest for a fix, with much limb-flinging, viscera-spilling, flesh-tearing glee. It takes place on Blood Mountain. You expected less?
Films like Cocaine Bear share the challenge of tone, or rather the dilemma of which one it should be and how to strike it? This is stupid shit. It’s nonsense. And Banks and writer Jimmy Warden know it. What they don’t know is which way they want to go. The more ridiculous anti-drug rhetoric of the ’80s is juxtaposed over the opening frames, suggesting a farce is in the offing, seemingly confirmed by Rhys’s deliciously manic cameo and peaking with an extended sequence centred on the park office, Liz’s commitment to “getting” both the bear and the petty thieves, and a pair of paramedics called to treat a concussion. It. Is. A. Riot. It’s one of those segments where the antics go on and on and on – and are oddly more effective for it. But when semi-local cops, Bob and Reba (Isiah Whitlock Jr and Ayoola Smart), get involved a vaguely serious turn clangs with the rest and the whole thing loses steam, lurching to a halt until the next shot of absurdity.
But regardless of tonal (and pacing) issues, all this works as much as it does because the cast goes all in; everyone delivers with a suitably straight face and plays it right down the middle. It also helps immensely that the digital ursine star (courtesy of WETA) is entirely convincing for the vast majority of her screen time; the film really is at its best at its bloodiest. It makes you wonder what kind of classic Cocaine Bear could have been had it taken a fully unhinged, more horror-skewering road. — DEK