Once upon a time, circa 1985, there was a beautiful black bear that lived in a national park in the state of Georgia. One day, strange brick-like objects fell from the sky and burst open, exposing a white powder the bear could not resist eating. In the real life version of this tale, ingesting the white powder (35 pounds of it) caused the 175-pound beauty to die of a drug overdose, but in Cocaine Bear, actor-turned-director Elizabeth Banks’ gleefully gory, naughty but tame horror comedy, the bear turns into a marauding beast with one goal: finding more coke.
This is not a film Nancy Reagan would have screened for Ronnie at the White House, especially after seeing the part, early on, when two 12-year-olds (Brooklyn Prince and Christian Convery) dare one another to sample (by taste) the cocaine they find in the forest while ditching school. Dee Dee and Henry will quickly spit out the foul tasting powder but Banks (Pitch Perfect 2; Charlie’s Angels) and screenwriter Jimmy Warden have made their point: this is a movie that isn’t afraid to offend in its quest for a belly laugh. Those two kids, in fact, will turn out to be much smarter than the hapless adults who follow in their wake, a fair number of whom will end up missing an arm or a leg after making the mistake of coming between the bear and the various bricks of cocaine strewn throughout the forest.
One part Jaws and many parts Snakes on a Plane, Cocaine Bear is talkier than it should be and peaks with a virtuoso mid-film scene of carnage, but an able cast do their best to keep us amused in between kills. The great Margo Martindale, with her gift for suppressed grievance, has a grand time as an embittered Park Ranger who plans to spend the day wooing a moronic animal rights activist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), only to see that dream waylaid by the arrival of Sari (Keri Russell), who’s looking for her daughter, Dee Dee, and her friend, Henry. (Russell’s husband, Matthew Rhys, plays the parachuting drug…
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