Cocaine Bear Review – Coke is Bad but Not For Bears

If you’re judging the film from its title alone, it may or may not intrigue you. After all, the movie sounds like a straight-to-video B-movie flick that you find next to films such as Sharknado or VelociPastor. Yet, that’s part of the fun of Cocaine Bear — a playfully self-aware comedy that has a field day employing slasher movie tropes.

Cocaine Bear follows an eccentric group of cops, criminals, teens, and tourists who converge in a Georgia forest. There, a massive black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting lots of cocaine.

Jimmy Warden (The Babysitter films) pens a script difficult to pigeonhole. The concept is comedic, but it’s a slasher and gangster flick and an anti-drug tale. It’s far from a revolutionary movie, but different from what you expected. Sadly, the execution doesn’t stand up to the ideas presented in the film, and some storylines work better than others.

Cocaine Bear is a film that has a lot of fun that you should see with an audience—preferably while a bit drunk.

Cocaine is an imperfect film. For one thing, there is barely any character development in this film for most of the cast. Alden Ehrenreich carries most of the weight by taking a broad character arc as the film progresses. He has a good handle on balancing dramatic and comedic scenes. Unfortunately, the gangster storyline doesn’t quite have the dramatic impact they thought it would. The rest of the cast is solid in their performances despite a need for more material to work with.

On the other hand, the rest of the characters are potential cannon fodder for the coked-up, rampaging bear. Yet, half of the film’s fun comes from the gory deaths of these innocent bystanders. The other half stems from seeing the titular character’s non-violent cocaine trips. It’s unapologetic in portraying the rampage of a bear high on cocaine. It’s hilarious, gory, and gloriously over-the-top.

Overall, Cocaine Bear is a film that has a lot of fun that you should see with an audience—preferably while a bit drunk. It’s easy to pick holes in a story about a bear that is incredibly high on cocaine. Still, the whole point of watching a movie like this is to be entertained and enjoy the craziness with the audience members around you—often accompanied by the consumption of alcohol. But not drugs, though. If there’s one thing to take away from Cocaine Bear, it is that drugs are bad. Very, very bad. That is unless you watch a bear ingest it from the comfort of a theater.

Rating: 3/5 atoms

Cocaine Bear hits theaters on February 24th.