By Jordan Nuner,
Lance Hooper and
Casey Jones
Staff Reporters
Let’s get the white elephant out of the room and mention that this review will reference cocaine many times as “Cocaine Bear” is an action thriller movie inspired by the true story of a bear that ingested cocaine that had been dropped from a plane in 1985. The movie starts off on the plane with the drugs being tossed out with the intention of getting them later but the pilot does not make it after his parachute fails to deploy, leaving the coke for the bear.
This mass-murdering black bear is obsessed with cocaine and will attack anyone who gets in his way. A cast of wacky characters, with lots of campy, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, makes for a fun ride along with a great soundtrack reminiscent of the seventies and eighties hits. These characters venture out into the woods to get the drugs for themselves,only to the bear who has eaten them.
The movie uses its characters to tell an interesting and gruesome story about the bear who is facing addiction and withdrawal from the drugs it has ingested and portrays a serious issue in a way that is both hilarious and not at the same time. The humor in this movie is very dry.
The writer Jimmy Warden makes some fun character choices, even making cocaine one of the characters in the cast lineup. Alden Ehrenreich really adds a funny depressed comedic performance as Eddie, Margo Martindale adds more star power to the ensemble, and Kerri Russell plays a single mom frantically trying to save her daughter perfectly.
Even Mathew Ries makes a 30-second cameo to bring more recognizability to the lineup. They say truth is stranger than fiction and they hit the nail on the head with “Cocaine Bear” in that description because this is the strangest true story adapted to the big screen I’ve ever seen.
The cinematography was amazing and the only issue I had with the movie was some of the cringe worthy dialogue. It may have been intended to be cringe but it made some parts of the movie off-putting but did not ruin the overall experience. It is extremely violent and graphic, but also exciting, so if you are over the age of eighteen, I recommend that you see this movie but not if you are squeamish as this movie is not for the faint of heart.
The moral of the story, bears are good if you leave them alone, but drugs are bad, and they do not belong in the wild. For audiences who have not been to the theater since the pandemic, desperate for a good time, it was great to see, with the audience’s reaction. I thought it was a good balance of horror and humor, with a ton of splatter.
The real story is less bloody. It all began, as you might guess, in the 1980s. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced in December 1985 that a 175-pound black bear had “died of an overdose of cocaine after discovering a batch of the drug,” according to The New York Times.
Today, the very same bear is said to be on display in Lexington, Ky., at Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall. The mall said in an Aug. 2015 blog post that workers there wanted to know what happened to the bear and found out it had been stuffed. The blog post says the stuffed bear was at one point owned by the country singer Waylon Jennings, who kept it in his home in Las Vegas, before it was delivered to the store.
As strange and gratuitous as Cocaine Bear sounds it is a well-produced and directed film, with amazing special effects that sell the crazy farce, all-star cast to audiences, and is an unexpected win at the box office. And yes the ‘Just say no to drugs’ theme is portrayed in the movie. You just don’t have time to think about it because you are witnessing a bear on cocaine. In the end, you love to feel bad for the bear and this messy entanglement she wound up in.
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