A mostly entertaining\u00a0\u2013\u00a0and only mildly offensive \u2013\u00a0film that strikes a careful balance between bad-taste comedy and commercial viability. <\/p>
By Emma Simmonds\n \t\t<\/p>
Published: Thursday, 23 February 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>
\u2018Never let the truth get in the way of a good story\u2019 goes the old saying, and it\u2019s advice that the makers of Cocaine Bear seem to have taken to their hearts.<\/p>\n
You can see why the events that inspired it would be irresistible to the creators of a certain kind of cinema; in the mid-\u201980s a black bear was found to have devoured vast quantities of the drug in question after it was dumped into woodland from the plane of a smuggler. The potential was clearly huge.<\/p>\n
Using this bizarre incident as his jumping-off point, the film\u2019s screenwriter Jimmy Warden runs wild with it as a group of disparate characters converge on the territory of the coke-addled beast.<\/p>\n
Actress-turned-director Elizabeth Banks is at the helm of this mostly entertaining, only mildly offensive adaptation, bringing enough deranged energy to her efforts and striking a careful balance between bad-taste comedy and commercial viability. It\u2019s Banks\u2019s third film calling the shots, following Pitch Perfect 2 and 2019\u2019s Charlie\u2019s Angels, and she\u2019s assembled a great cast, who add value to the material at every turn.<\/p>\n
Matthew Rhys appears fleetingly as the aforementioned smuggler, Andrew C Thornton II, who died during the incident when his parachute failed to open, something which, like much of the movie, is played for laughs. The filmmakers depart from reality almost instantly; the real bear was not known to have harmed anyone before its untimely death, and yet here it is reimagined as an insatiable foe.<\/p>\n
Amongst the ensemble are Keri Russell as Sari, a nurse who traces her school-skipping, 12-year-old daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) down to Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia, where the pumped-up predator awaits.<\/p>\n
Also en route to the woods are drug dealer Daveed, played by O\u2019Shea Jackson Jr, who is trying to track down the missing cocaine on behalf of his menacing boss Syd (Ray Liotta), with the gangster\u2019s grieving son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) reluctantly in tow.<\/p>\n
Isiah Whitlock Jr is the cop on the case, Bob, while legendary character actress Margo Martindale has some spectacular indignities in store as Liz, the forest ranger distracted by her attraction to her colleague Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson).<\/p>\n
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