(MA15+) ★★★½
Director: Elizabeth Banks
Cast: Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Ray Liotta, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Christian Convery, Aaron Holliday, Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Kristofer Hivju, Hannah Hoekstra, Ayoola Smart.
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| Cocaine Bear's brother Weed Bear preferred to sleep. |
Cocaine Bear is a great bad idea, the kind that happens at 3am after too many edibles, and then you wake up two days later and find you've written a script in a fever dream you don't remember, and the script is Cocaine Bear, and it's not bad, and then you polish it up and it's actually really good, and somehow Elizabeth Banks ends up directing it and you're like "holy shit, Elizabeth Banks, she was great in those Pitch Perfect films and The Hunger Games, and she directed Pitch Perfect 2, which was pretty good, although she was also in and directed part of Movie 43, which is one of the worst movies ever so there's that", but she does a great job directing this film based super loosely on the real life bear that died after eating 34kgs of cocaine that was thrown out of a plane in 1985 and when I say loosely I mean very very loosely, because, like, no one knows anything about what the real Cocaine Bear did before it died though its a pretty safe bet that it talked incessantly at a party and was super annoying and didn't sleep for 36 hours but this movie imagines the bear as a psycho killer, running through the woods of Georgia off its guts on charlie, attacking everyone it comes across, but what's really wild about this movie is that its actually really good, like the script is actually really good because this is basically a B movie right, except it's really well acted and the script gives a few of the characters half-decent arcs so we care about them in between the cavalcade of face-ripping and disembowelling wrought by Ol' Queen Cocaine Bear herself because did I mention this is hella-gory, like you see dudes get their guts ripped out and their heads blown off and someone does a pretty brutal slide along a road and it's messed up and all looks super-convincing, like, even the bear looks pretty good at times, great work Weta, but somehow the film is hilarious and I guess that comes back to that solid script again, which just works, like, it sets a great tone that says "yes, this is batshit crazy, we know its batshit crazy, but sometimes batshit crazy can be good, like, hear me out, what if we treat this shit serious and shit, but, you know, the whole time it's about a bear that's ripped off its tits on candy" and that's what I love about it, because it's really funny and really brutal but it's damned entertaining and it is some high-quality B movie stuff, and holy shit you've gotta see the trailer, here, here, I'll show you, no, right now, here watch this, watch this...
...right, like, they got a surprisingly rad cast for it, see, like Keri Russell, remember her from Felicity, but she's been in heaps of stuff since then and she's really good as a mum protecting her daughter and it's like a metaphor for a Mama Bear protecting her cubs, and Ice Cube's son is in it and he played Ice Cube in Straight Outta Compton (isn't that wild?), and his name's O'Shea Jackson Jr, in real life I mean, not in this movie, in this movie he's called Daveed, and Alden Ehrenreich is in it too and he was Han Solo in that Solo spin-off movie and damn that was great and I wish they would make a sequel, oh yeah, and he's in this and he's really good, oh and this is one of Ray Liotta's last movies so there's that, but anyway, this is how you do a B movie properly, 'cos what you do is you lean into the insanity but treat it seriously like 'holy shit that bear just ripped that dude's head off' but the characters are as freaked out as you, and yeah it's kinda dumb in places, but I was surprised by how good it was, so, yeah, there's that.
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