“Stupid fun with a great cast, Cocaine Bear manages to do good things without forgetting what kind of movie it’s trying to be.”
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The veteran cast has fun with their roles
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The multigenerational appeal of killer bears to cocaine addicts
Judging by the crowd that gathered for the first local screening of Elizabeth Banks’ gory comedy about the killer bear, Cocaine bear could be the movie event of the year. Banks’s strange, wild film was partly inspired by the true story of an American black bear that swallowed a massive amount of cocaine dumped in the wild by a drug smuggler in 1985. In the real world, the bear sadly died of an overdose, but Banks’ R-rated film imagines a timeline in that bear went on a cocaine-fueled killing spree through the forests of Georgia, tearing tourists, security guards and aspiring drug smugglers to bloody pieces.
It’s a premise that clearly resonates across a broad, generational spectrum, but is it a good one? At its best, Cocaine bear is a mixed bag. The film’s impressive cast mostly feels like it’s in-joke, and generally maintains a sweet spot between downright camp and taking itself too seriously.
Universal Pictures
An inside joke
Banks brings together a great ensemble cast Cocaine bear who know when to overdo the drama and when to play it straight.
Playing a henchman tasked with recovering cocaine, O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight from Compton) is positioned as a kind of audience surrogate, observing (and experiencing) the madness of it all through a (relatively) rational prism. Conversely, the reliably entertaining Margo Martindale (Justified) plays an impulsive, gun-toting forest ranger with an inferiority complex and an itchy trigger finger ready to add more mayhem to the saga.
The cast is completed by Keri Russell (Americans) as a mother in a neon-pink tracksuit who searches for her missing daughter, who has been abducted – and inexplicably, not mauled – by a bear. The Florida Project actress Brooklynn Prince plays the daughter, while Christian Convery (Sweet tooth) features a girl’s best friend who seems well aware that these events will turn him into the therapist’s most lucrative client.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Alden Ehrenreich pushing some of the film’s other narrative threads forward (Solo: A Star Wars Story) as the grieving partner of Jackson’s character, Isiah Whitlock Jr.Wire) as a sad police detective investigating the whereabouts of missing cocaine, and Ray Liotta as a drug lord on the hook for a failed drug deal — it’s one of Good guys the last roles of the actor.
More familiar faces pop in and out of the film, mostly to add some comic relief before their characters are savagely mangled, including Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Modern Family), Christopher Hivju (Game of Thrones), and Matthew Rhys (Americans), among others. Their screen time is short but effective, and Banks does a good job of putting them in a position to get the maximum amount of laughs.
While the overall feel of the film falters a bit as it plays with familiar genre tropes — a single mother who finds her inner strength while protecting her child, criminals who change their minds when faced with the consequences of their actions, an animal rights activist who gets eaten by the creatures she protects — Cocaine bear it strikes a balance between not being as funny as you hope and not as stupid as you fear. It’s also a cleverly compact, 95-minute escapade that knows it has to get the job done before your buzz starts to wear off.
Dumbing down
Cocaine Bear | Official trailer [HD]
Ultimately, Cocaine bear lives up to its wild premise, as long as you enter the theater with the appropriate expectations.
Banks’ film is well-executed silly fun, with an edge that never goes too far, and a self-awareness that ensures you don’t think too much about the escalating insanity of the events unfolding on screen. It feels deliberately bad, and everyone is in on the joke, including the expertly animated CG bear that becomes John Wick Bear during the film (it’s worth noting that the bear was created by the talented team at Weta FX and real star of the movie).
The film’s opening scene features a cocaine-addled pilot (Rhys) deflating bags from a plane, only to pass out and fall to his death, setting the events of the story in motion. It’s the scene that seems to offer the best advice Cocaine bear can offer the audience: If you want to have a good time, turn off your brain, because this is where things get dumber.
Directed by Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine bear it’s in theaters now.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn