Deborah Ross

The bear overacts the least: Cocaine Bear reviewed

Mostly, I kept wondering: isn’t cocaine meant to diminish appetite?

Hannah Hoekstra (Elsa) and the bear, who overacts the least. Credit: © 2023 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved

With a title like Cocaine Bear you’ll probably be happily anticipating one of those B-movie cultural moments. It’s a bear! On cocaine! Sign me up! You go to a film like this in the spirit of trash-loving glee. It’ll be fun. It’ll be 90 minutes of low camp entertainment rather than a four-hour Oscar-contending head-scratcher – and that can be a relief. But, in fact, and despite the publicity blitzkrieg – it’s a bear! On cocaine! – this is a standard animal-on-the-rampage affair. The cocaine doesn’t even bring much to the party. (Kids: take note.) Quite what I was expecting, I don’t know. Maybe the bear would become euphoric and chatty and stay up until the wee hours before becoming paranoid and crashing? That would have been more interesting, surely.

The film states at the outset that it’s ‘based on a true story’ although ‘based on’ is doing a heck of a lot of work. What happened was: in 1985 drug smugglers dropped a cocaine haul from a plane into the wilderness in Tennessee as the cargo was too heavy in flight. Three months later a dead black bear was discovered in Georgia and, as was further discovered, it had eaten the cocaine and overdosed. That would have been quite a boring film. So the filmmakers have asked: what if the bear, jacked up on coke, and seeking more, encountered humans and decided to eat them? And yet they’ve somehow made their own rather boring film. Congratulations, all round.

Mostly, I kept wondering: isn’t cocaine meant to diminish appetite?

Written by Jimmy Warden and directed by Elizabeth Banks, the film opens with the plane dump, then we’re at a national park in Georgia with an engaged couple on a hike who spot the bear not being euphoric or chatty but repeatedly hitting its head on a tree trunk, for some reason.

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