MOVIE
Cocaine Bear
Director Elizabeth Banks
Review Ray Chan
Just when you thought every conceivable genre has been covered in the movie industry – from comedy to horror, from romance to drama, from westerns to space shenanigans – comes along a film like Cocaine Bear, so refreshingly different that it could indeed have created a new classification of its own. Attenborough adventures on acid, perhaps.
The titular character is a 220kg (impressively CGI-ed) American black bear that accidentally snorts cocaine, and ends up pummeling his paws onto every unexpecting human who it encounters, creating an aisle of evisceration and entrails.
This sublimely ridiculous romp is based (very loosely) on a true event in which a bear was found dead in the forest after sniffing in too much of the happy dust.
The film opens with a drug smuggler liberally tossing bricks of crack from the side of his plane over Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest. After losing his footing and knocking himself unconscious, he plummets to his death in the suburbs of Tennessee.
As fate would have it, much of the coke is unintentionally discovered and ingested by the bear, prompting it on a murderous rampage while on the hunt for her next fix of the white stuff.
Caught in the carnivore’s sights are a whole lot of varied individuals: protective mother Sari, who’s ventured into the woods to find her school truant daughter, Dee Dee and her best friend Henry; Daveed and Eddie, who are on a mission to find the missing cocaine for Eddie’s drug kingpin father, Syd (played by the late Ray Liotta); detective Bob, who is investigating the runner’s mysterious death; and no-nonsense park ranger Liz and her wildlife inspector crush Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson).
And that’s just for starters, with an array of other characters accidentally becoming victims of the bruin’s addled divergent demeanour, but who end up damaged, dissected or dead through one mishap after another. Indeed, prepare yourself for some of the most wildly imaginative and utterly ludicrous murders seen this year, especially one sublime sequence involving a speeding ambulance.
But they’re just collateral to add to the body count. It’s evident that director Elizabeth Banks wants the audience to connect with the core group of characters she’s focusing on and it’s clear whose fate she wants viewers to give a damn about.
At the end of the day, you’re here to see a gargantuan grizzly high on the white stuff rip up a dozen people with fitful abandon. Banks fully embraces the utter absurdity of the premise with fiendish fervour, doling out equal lashings of irreverent humour and gory violence, and creating a black comedy in the purest sense.
Cocaine Bear is entertaining with a capital E, absurd with a capital A, and farcical with a capital F. And, dammit with a capital D, if it isn’t one of the most deliciously enjoyable experiences inside a cinema this year.
The titular character is a 220kg (impressively CGI-ed) American black bear that accidentally snorts cocaine, and ends up pummeling his paws onto every unexpecting human who it encounters, creating an aisle of evisceration and entrails.
This sublimely ridiculous romp is based (very loosely) on a true event in which a bear was found dead in the forest after sniffing in too much of the happy dust.
The film opens with a drug smuggler liberally tossing bricks of crack from the side of his plane over Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest. After losing his footing and knocking himself unconscious, he plummets to his death in the suburbs of Tennessee.
As fate would have it, much of the coke is unintentionally discovered and ingested by the bear, prompting it on a murderous rampage while on the hunt for her next fix of the white stuff.
Caught in the carnivore’s sights are a whole lot of varied individuals: protective mother Sari, who’s ventured into the woods to find her school truant daughter, Dee Dee and her best friend Henry; Daveed and Eddie, who are on a mission to find the missing cocaine for Eddie’s drug kingpin father, Syd (played by the late Ray Liotta); detective Bob, who is investigating the runner’s mysterious death; and no-nonsense park ranger Liz and her wildlife inspector crush Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson).
And that’s just for starters, with an array of other characters accidentally becoming victims of the bruin’s addled divergent demeanour, but who end up damaged, dissected or dead through one mishap after another. Indeed, prepare yourself for some of the most wildly imaginative and utterly ludicrous murders seen this year, especially one sublime sequence involving a speeding ambulance.
But they’re just collateral to add to the body count. It’s evident that director Elizabeth Banks wants the audience to connect with the core group of characters she’s focusing on and it’s clear whose fate she wants viewers to give a damn about.
At the end of the day, you’re here to see a gargantuan grizzly high on the white stuff rip up a dozen people with fitful abandon. Banks fully embraces the utter absurdity of the premise with fiendish fervour, doling out equal lashings of irreverent humour and gory violence, and creating a black comedy in the purest sense.
Cocaine Bear is entertaining with a capital E, absurd with a capital A, and farcical with a capital F. And, dammit with a capital D, if it isn’t one of the most deliciously enjoyable experiences inside a cinema this year.
#universal #cocainebear
