Cocaine Bear
Director: Elizabeth Banks
Writer: Jimmy Warden
Cast: Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Ray Liotta, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Christian Convery, Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Kristofer Hivju, Hannah Hoekstra, Ayoola Smart, Scott Seiss, Matthew Rhys
Seen on: 16.4.2023

Plot:
After a drug deal gone bad, a lot of cocaine ends up in a Georgia forest and is discovered by a local bear who absolutely takes a liking to it. Unfortunately, a bear on cocaine is quite a menace, be it to hikers (Kristofer Hivja, Hannah Hoekstra), local kids (Brooklynn Prince, Christian Convery) or the rangers in the national park (Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson). And gangster Syd (Ray Liotta) really needs his cocaine back.

I was fully prepared for Cocaine Bear to be a wild ride, to lean back and enjoy it thoroughly. Unfortunately the film never real came together for me. While it has some fun moments, it is overall too long and uneven.

It was pretty early in the film that I started to have my doubts about it, when Kristofer Hivju’s character Olaf is called Kristofer on screen. It’s an embarrassing mistake that I’m confident could have been taken care of rather easily in editing. That nobody noticed/cared enough to do so/minded did not bode well for the production of the film. In hindsight it seemed outright indicative of what was to come.

We all know that the premise of the film is ridiculous. It’s meant to be, therein lies the biggest draw of the film. But something being ridiculous doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need care – and I can’t help but feel that the film lacks a bit of that and tries to substitute with (rather surprising amounts of) gore and drug jokes.

Every once in a while the film I wanted to see makes a short appearance only to be dragged away and mauled by pacing that could have used a bit more cocaine-fueled energy. This is the one thing I really did not expect to be a complaint here, by the way: that the film about a bear on a bloody rampage with its slick 90 minute runtime would start to drag, but here we are.

All of that meant I left the cinema feeling a little deflated. I expected a comedy highlight and got a bit of a laugh and a lot more yawning. Maybe if I had seen the film with more of a SLASH Filmfestival crowd and not the regular cinema folk, it would have pulled me along better. But that is idle speculation for a film I just expected more of.

Summarizing: disappointing.