Movie Review : Cocaine Bear (2023)
Film director and hall of fame geek Kevin Smith has this expression that I like. When discussing good, but forgotten films on his podcast, he often says: "it’s just a movie", meaning that it lives up to its existential duty of entertaining you for ninety minutes or so. There was a time where a movie was "just a movie", but it has become increasingly difficult for films to exist in a continuum of their own. They are either connected by a shared world, nostalgic references or arbitrary meaning granted by analysis (hah!)
I do believe Cocaine Bear is a movie that manages to remain just a movie for ninety-five minutes, which is some kind of exploit.
Unashamedly written in the mold of Snake on a Plane, Cocaine Bear tells the (kind of) true story of a monster cocaine shipment being hastilty thrown into the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Park by the pilot of a plane in distress (Matthew Rhys). In real life, a bear ate a brick of cocaine and died of an overdose. In Cocaine Bear, the titular blow-addicted mammal goes on a murderous rampage while searching for hits of his new powdered overlord and anyone who even touches the drugs becomes at risk of getting eaten alive.
The politics of remaining "just a movie"
The best (and funniest) thing about Cocaine Bear is how it eludes any attempt at deconstruction. Your enjoyment of this movie will greatly depend on your capacity to laugh at jokes featuring people getting eaten alive by a bear, but it delivers exactly that in the best possible way. Making such a movie could be construed as nihilistic and offensive, but Cocaine Bear's screenwriter Jimmy Warden constantly reminds the audience of two thing: 1) that didn’t really happen and 2) the people dying don’t really exist.
Cocaine Bear is very much an ensemble movie and some characters have interiority and others don't. Those who are not stereotypes survive and those who have been created solely for the purpose of our twisted entertainment don’t. It is never explicitly claimed, but Cocaine Bear feels like it's been told from the perspective of the survivors, so the victims of the bear come off like part of an anecdote. Which they totally are, except for instrumental drug mogul Syd White, interpreted by the late Ray Liotta.
So, you can laugh at people getting fucked up by a bear because there’s no doubt that they’ve been written into the movie for the sole purpose of that. My favorites were park ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) who constantly endangers people with her service weapon and the paramedic Tom (played by TikTok Star Scott Seiss) who is simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Seiss just has an unbelievable talent for slapstick comedy. Cast him as Buston Keaton in a biopic anyday.
But what about the bear? Isn’t it sadistic to watch a bear getting hooked on cocaine against his will? Well, not this bear. If you feel like this bear who moves like Yogi and reacts like Popeye after eating spinach after a bump of cocaine is meant to represent a real bear, I don’t know what to tell you. The real bear died right away and it was a tragedy. Cocaine Bear is an extrapolation of local folklore, like a barroom story taken to its extreme by a talented, but extremely unreliable narrator.
Alright, it’s just a film about a cocaine-snorting bear. But is it good?
I mean, it's as good as a horror comedy can be. The genre alone is not exactly conducive to transcendent emotional experiences, but screenwriter Jimmy Warden shows a certain degree of mastery of stereotypes and overcooked narrative. Enough to bring you through the experience with a certain sense of purpose. While Keri Russell’s character of the overworked single mom nurse and her two shitty kids rings hollow and superfluous, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and David (Oshea Jackson Jr.) are interesting.
The first one is the petulent adult child of a drug lord who's undergoing the very real psychological ordeal of losing his girlfriend to cancer and the other is a blue collar enforcer who doesn't exactly know where to draw the line between friendship and business. Therefore, he's on the constant lookout for outlets to his building anger and frustration. Eddie is allowed to grieve despite the assignment because of his social status, while David getting rammed by circumstances and yet bravely sucks it up.
But Eddie never comes off as useless or petulant. He’s sensitive, sincere and more than able to hold his own in a stressful environment. Therefore, he feels more alive and realistic than any character in this movie (on top of being played by an gracefully aging Alden Ehrenreich), but never to a point where he feels out of place. Like every character in Cocaine Bear, Eddie is just a character and never a vessel for the audience to live vicariously through. His ordeal is too shitty and dangerous anyway.
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Cocaine Bear is not an instant classic in any way, but it's the best film I've ever seen that relies solely on a stupid idea to function. Given the cultural and political landscape, it's incredibly liberating to watch a movie that allows itself to be mindless and idiotic just because it's fun to be mindless and idiotic sometimes. Given how it's been performing since its release last Friday’ i have no doubt that it's going to bear fruit in popular culture and it's a good thing. Movies should sometimes just be movies.
