Review of Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks

I don’t know where I saw the first trailer for Cocaine Bear, but I know that when I saw it for the first time, I had to see it. There are some stupid movies that I would absolutely refuse to see because I don’t feel like wasting my time in a movie theater (M3GAN was one of them), but I knew I had to see this one in a theater just for the reactions of the audience.

So, when I was in the middle of Seattle with my best friend at a conference with nothing to do, we ended up seeing Cocaine Bear at around 8 PM in the night. We got a nice dinner at the Din Tai Fung in the same mall complex that was across from the AMC (if you go to Din Tai Fung, you have to absolutely try the Shanghai rice cakes.

They’re to die for.), then headed over for our nightly screening on a Wednesday night. And, surprisingly, we were not the only ones. It was a good audience, too.

Onwards with the review!

Moving drugs goes wrong when a bear eats all of the cocaine inside a national park.

This movie is loosely based off of true events, with a major fictional bend towards what happened during those events. There was a famous drug smuggler during the eighties called Andrew Thornton II who was smuggling a ton of cocaine through a plane, which is depicted in the opening scenes of the movie.

He was coming back from Colombia with the goods when he ended up getting caught in his parachute, hitting the ground normally, and dying from the impacts of it. But because the plane crashed and the cocaine was dispensed onto the ground, a black bear was found inside of a National Park that had died of a cocaine overdose.

But in the movie, the story is much different. We get the backstory of the individual characters in the beginning. There’s Dee Dee, who lives with her mother in Georgia.

She doesn’t go to school one day and actually heads to the National Park with her best friend Henry, but while they’re on the pathway in front of a map telling them where to go, where Dee Dee wants to draw, they find the bricks of cocaine. They notice it looks like an animal got into them, but then they turn around and discover the bear that’s high on cocaine.

Before this, there’s a scene showing the bear killing a hiker’s soon-to-be fiancé, and the man flees into the woods to get away from the bear. The police department is onto the case now, and a detective is heading out onto the scene before giving his new beloved dog to the deputy he works with to watch over.

We meet the Park Ranger, who is an older woman flirting with an activist who spouts animal facts, and also a trio of three boys that not only steal some of the cocaine, but are about the rob the Ranger.

We also have a cut to the head of the mob, portrayed by Ray Liotta, and how he sends one of his men to collect his depressed son to get back all of their cocaine. The final character brought back into this fold is Dee Dee’s mom Sari, who goes to collect the kids in a hot pink jumpsuit.

The rest of this movie, in a nutshell, is all of the characters trying to go about their agenda and/or trying to survive against the brutal bear. There are some big plot twists that are hilarious, and then there are moments that are honestly kind of cringey.

We learn pretty quickly that the bear is solely after the cocaine because it needs a fix, and later on that it’s a mother with two cubs to feed that are also now addicted to cocaine. This is a movie that tries to hit all of the tropes in one go while not taking itself too seriously, but those looking for a quote-on-quote legitimate film are not going to like this one at all.

Overall Thoughts

I think it was worth it. My friend and I both enjoyed the movie a lot and thought that we got our money’s worth, but I can see how the average person who takes things more seriously might be horrified at a movie like Cocaine Bear.

It’s fun, it’s full of eighties references, and the audience I was with was eating it up. I couldn’t imagine seeing the movie in any other way.

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