![]() Banks wants you to connect with the core group of characters she’s focusing on and it’s clear whose fate she wants her audience to give a damn about.Īt the end of the day, you’re here to see a gargantuan bear high on cocaine rip a dozen people to death. Most of them are merely here to add to the rising body count and that’s perfectly fine in a movie of this nature. ![]() There are far too many characters here (I’ve barely mentioned half the full cast above) and Warden’s screenplay can’t possibly flesh them all out effectively. and Ehrenreich that proves to be the true heart of the film. And there’s a great dynamic between Jackson Jr. Converey is a delight as the constantly rattled youngster who will do anything to impress his gal pal including swallowing an entire tablespoon of cocaine. Even usually restrained actors like Russell and Martindale throw themselves into this madness, particularly the latter who steals the entire film as a slightly, ahem, amorous trooper. It helps that Banks has a fully committed ensemble cast along for the ride who all understand the assignment entirely. Perhaps it helps that Banks cut her teeth as an actress on the set of 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, as she’s infused Cocaine Bearwith the silly sensibilities of an 80s cult comedy in the same vein as David Wain and Michael Showalter. She’s also wisely injected plenty of effectively built tension that adds a good dose of horror/thriller to the mix too. With equal lashings of irreverent humour and gory violence, this is a black comedy in the purest sense. And this is one hell of a yarn.īanks fully embraces the utter absurdity of this premise with such devilish gusto. But, as Aussie icon Chopper Read once said, never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. His taxidermied corpse is currently on display in a Kentucky shopping mall. In reality, the unfortunate bear stumbled upon Thornton’s abandoned loot, swallowed an entire duffel bag containing 34 kilograms of cocaine, and promptly died. ![]() The true story of the real-life cocaine bear is far less interesting than what screenwriter Jimmy Warden and Banks have cooked up. Caught in the bear’s sights are protective mother Sari ( Keri Russell), who’s ventured into the woods to find her scrappy, school-ditching daughter, Dee Dee ( Brooklynn Prince) and her best pal, Henry ( Christian Converey) Daveed ( O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and Eddie ( Alden Ehrenreich), who are on a mission to find the missing cocaine for Eddie’s drug kingpin father, Syd (the late great Ray Liotta) Bob ( Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a Tennessee detective investigating Thornton’s mysterious death and no-nonsense park ranger Liz ( Margo Martindale) and her wildlife inspector crush, Peter ( Jesse Tyler Ferguson). After losing his footing and knocking himself unconscious, Thornton plummets to his death in the suburbs of Tennessee.Īs fate would have it, the coke is unintentionally ingested by a female black bear who promptly begins a murderous rampage while on the hunt for her next fix of the white stuff. Loosely (and I used that term liberally) based on true events, Cocaine Bear opens with coked-up drug smuggler Andrew Thornton ( Matthew Rhys) liberally tossing bricks of cocaine from the side of his plane over Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest in a drastic attempt to lighten the plane’s load. That’s just the tip of the outrageous iceberg in Elizabeth Banks‘ tremendously entertaining and sublimely ridiculous romp Cocaine Bear a film that knows precisely what it is and gleefully serves up 95 minutes of pure unadulterated fun. But then a film comes along featuring a 500 lb American black bear snorting cocaine off a dead man’s severed leg and you realise cinema still has the power to shock you in the best way possible. When you’ve been watching movies as long as I have, you start to think you’ve seen it all.
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