Wet Hot American Summer, the 2001 cult comedy co-starring Elizabeth Banks, opens with the song “Jane” by Jefferson Starship. You may recall that Banks played Lindsay, a horny camp counselor who makes out with Paul Rudd a lot, at least until her face gets covered in barbecue sauce. This is worth mentioning because Cocaine Bear, the new film directed by Banks, also begins with the same needle drop. Perhaps Banks meant to suggest that fans of Wet Hot are in good hands here, but the reference has the opposite effect: it creates an immediate basis for comparison, one that does not work in her favor.
Despite the title essentially doubling as a summary, some additional context is necessary. In 1985, there was a bear who overdosed on cocaine it found in the Tennessee mountains, apparently because drug smugglers dropped a shipment out of a plane nearby. This incident was probably not particularly funny: in all likelihood, it behaved erratically before its heart gave out. Nonetheless, this footnote in American forestry caught the popular imagination, to the point that Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden thought it would be good material for film. Of course, such a premise presents immediate challenges: how do you stretch out a minor incident into a feature-length runtime? Banks and Warden imagine drug dealers who are looking for cocaine, and a host of bystanders standing in the bear’s wake.
At first, it does not seem there are too many characters to follow. O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Ehrenreich play drug dealers who head to the mountain where they think the missing cocaine might be located, while Margo Martindale plays a hapless park ranger and Isiah Whitlock Jr. plays a cop tracking the shipment. All these characters have superfluous backstory, with Warden using one particular personality quirk each to drum up human interest. Whitlock plays a hard-ass cop, but he recently adopted a puppy he does not really want. Ehrenreich plays an absent father who is grieving the death of his wife. None of these details add much human interest to Cocaine Bear, to the point where each discursive dialogue scene is a chore, and there are long, seemingly interminable stretches without jokes or laughter.
What Banks fails to grasp, and what undermines Cocaine Bear for most of its runtime, is that appearances alone are not enough to make us care. Whitlock is perhaps best known for playing the Mayor of Baltimore in The Wire, and yet this dumb movie thinks it’s above the actor using his beloved “Shiiiiiiit” catchphrase. Similarly, Martindale has scenes with Keri Russell, playing a mother looking for her daughter lost in the woods, and somehow this reunion of The Americans goes by without comment. Even Ray Liotta, in his final film, plays as a drug dealer who never once rekindles the onscreen rage for which he was best known. These kinds of glaring oversights would be less annoying, perhaps, if the bear in question were a funnier creature, or more monstrous.
This bear, through a mix of drug-induced mania and general impatience, amasses quite a body count. Banks veers between horror-adjacent suspense scenes, and gallows/grossout humor where we wait to see just how these hapless idiots get themselves into trouble. Little of this is imaginative, a point made clear that the bear repeatedly happens upon another brick of white powder whenever the action starts to stall. Admittedly, there are some clever moments, like when the bear passes out under someone, or a briskly paced ambulance chase that ends with dismemberment and a long, bloody skid mark. In moments like this, Banks recalls the Coen brothers (Blood Simple in particular) in how simple logic can lead to extraordinary situations, but for the most part, that kind of queasy entertainment requires creativity that eludes her.
Not unlike Snakes on a Plane, as observed by Scott Tobias at the film newsletter The Reveal, Cocaine Bear will rely on deliberate virality for its success. The trailers and premise are meant to get people excited, albeit in an ironic way, and something is lost in that intentionality. Can something be truly viral when it’s designed to be that way? Perhaps you remember the recent superhero film Morbius, wherein someone posted the phrase “It’s Morbin’ time” and it became a whole thing. That kind of silly excitement is contagious because it happens spontaneously, whereas the whole buzz around Cocaine Bear is meant to bump its box office dollars (pun intended). And with all that bake-in cynicism, it still tries too hard to be a “real movie,” one with a plot, characters and dramatic stakes—to its detriment.
Do those pesky things matter to those who might say “one for Cocaine Bear” on opening night? Absolutely not.
Photo courtesy of Universal
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