Knoxville, Tennessee, the year is 1985. The body of Andrew C. Thornton II, a high-ranking member of The Company, a drug smuggling ring based in Kentucky, is discovered in the driveway of a local resident. It is determined that he jumped out of an airplane, and his parachute failed to deploy in the process, leading to him falling to his death.
Miles away, in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in northern Georgia, lies the body of a 175-pound black bear that overdosed on Thornton’s containers of cocaine. This story, which has since become the stuff of internet legend, serves as the inspiration for one of the most recent hits at the box office.
“Cocaine Bear” is a film that feels like a novelty. The concept in and of itself is very much sensational. On paper, it sounds like a low-budget B picture that a studio like The Asylum would put out, but surprisingly, this is distributed by Universal Pictures with a rather low (for a mainstream film) budget of $30 to $35 million, being provided by several film financiers.
Is it a masterpiece of a movie? Not per se, but it is an enjoyable watch.
This film contains a handful of storylines involving different characters, such as a nurse named Sari (played by Keri Russell), searching for her daughter Dee Dee, who went off into the forest.
There are also criminals Daveed and Eddie (played by O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich, respectively), who travel to the forest to search for the cocaine that belongs to drug kingpin Syd White (played by the late Ray Liotta), Eddie’s father.
Liotta – most famous for portraying the real-life Henry Hill, the central character in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster masterwork “Goodfellas” – takes on a role that is quite a fitting end to his great acting career, portraying a skeevy supplier of cocaine, similar to his character in the earlier Scorsese film.
In one of his final film appearances, Liotta does an amazing job as an intimidating figure, determined to get his product back. I was raving to my friends about his presence in the film long after we had left the screening.
Isiah Whitlock Jr. – most famous for his role as Clay Davis on the television show “The Wire” – appears in a really good supporting role as Bob, a detective with the Knoxville Police Department, who travels to Georgia to investigate the situation. He adds some humorous moments into his performance as the detective, such as when he sprinkles cocaine onto the bear.
The script, written by Jimmy Warden, adds an element of splatstick – a horror subgenre pioneered by films such as Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead II” and Peter Jackson’s “Braindead” – to the sheer insanity of the film’s concept.
As for the direction, Elizabeth Banks excelled at bringing this offbeat script to the silver screen. Banks – whose previous directorial work includes “Pitch Perfect 2” and the 2019 film adaptation of “Charlie’s Angels” – has possibly made the best film of her career so far, with some good choices, in terms of the casting and overall execution of the screenplay.
In terms of the soundtrack, there were some pretty good choices made with the music supervision. For instance, the song “Jane” by Jefferson Starship (one of the biggest hits by the band), is featured in the opening sequence where Andrew C. Thornton II, trafficking kilos of coke, takes the grave plunge out of the plane, immediately engulfing the viewer into this chaotic 95-minute flick. There is also the usage of a remix of Depeche Mode’s classic synth-pop hit “Just Can’t Get Enough”, featured in a hilarious and gruesome sequence.
The one major complaint that I have about this film is that the pacing is slow in the first act of the film. However, once the plot gets going, the film keeps a good steady pace.
“Cocaine Bear” is, at times, a gripping film that relishes in its B-movie excess, with an over-the-top premise mixed with a dark sense of humor. It’s another example of Universal being one of the few major mainstream studios distributing offbeat projects to movie theaters.
While there are issues with the film in terms of the pacing, it achieves the ridiculous and absurd nature of the story, in transferring it to the silver screen.
