'Cocaine Bear' Tries to Rev Up Moviegoers This Weekend
by EG
If you're a fan of Sharknado, you've probably been looking forward to Cocaine Bear, a violent, ridiculous comedy from director Elizabeth Banks. If you're not a fan of blood-spurting silliness, your options in theaters this weekend is going to be considerably limited. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania will try to hold on to the top spot, but negative word-of-mouth could cut into the Marvel movie's ticket sales in its second weekend. That leaves the coked-up CGI bear and the Christian drama Jesus Revolution as the only new wide releases for the week. Read on for details.
The cocaine was dropped in September, and the bear was found in December.
According to officials interviewed by reporters in 1985, police officers located the 175-pound apex predator surrounded by 40 opened containers of the drug in question. The story --as printed in The New York Times at least--was brief, barely even 100 words long. But the details--- the plane piloted by a cop turned smuggler, the offloaded drugs, the Draconian Nixon-era “War on Drugs,” the forest, the bear on blow -- are catnip for the imagination.
Elizabeth Banks’ highly anticipated adventure Cocaine Bear gorges on the “what ifs” of the case. What if the bear encountered people before it died? What if there were witnesses to its blood-thirsty addiction? What if it was a mother, and a symbol for humanity’s idiotic hubris in the natural world?
Don’t be turned off by that last question--heady and philosophical as it seems--because the film doesn’t linger too long on it: Cocaine Bear isn’t in the business of sacrificing antics for a greater purpose. It aims for maximum entertainment, reveling in farce and gnarly killings to create an experience that keeps you on your toes even if the details get murky upon further reflection.
Banks, who directed (her third feature-length outing behind the camera, following Pitch Perfect 2 and Charlie’s Angels), and Jimmy Warden, who wrote the screenplay, start with what we know to be true: A former Kentucky narcotics officer turned drug smuggler disposes of packages of cocaine before jumping from a malfunctioning plane. The Americans’ Matthew Rhys makes a cameo as the man, Andrew Thornton II, who unceremoniously plummets to his death after his parachute fails. Archival footage of the crash’s aftermath follows the opening sequence. Cocaine Bear does, in general, a smart job of weaving real newsreels and anti-drug commercials into the narrative. They add winking humor and reminders that there’s truth to this far-out tale.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.