To hear people talk about it now, ‘Snakes on a Plane’ was the first time anyone thought to use a movie’s title itself to get people’s attention. This is William Castle erasure. It also ignores such great 1950’s pulp titles as ‘I was a Teenage Werewolf’ or ‘I Married a Monster from Outer Space.’ Not to mention that in the 60’s and into the 70’s we started getting full-on exploitation gems like ‘Teenage Mother’ and ‘I Spit on Your Grave.’ Sometimes these titles are overly long, like ‘The Englishman who Went up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain,’ sometimes they’re punchy and intriguing, like ‘Two Thousand Maniacs.’ Anyone who sneers at a silly name is ignoring this long and proud tradition of slapping an attention-grabbing title on a movie that’s more interested in being entertaining than saying anything profound. Fun movies can be art too, and hooking people into seeing your works is what artists are supposed to do.
In another example of the continuing success of mid-budget movies, ‘Cocaine Bear’ cost a reported $35 million and earned just under $90 million. That’s Gerard Butler territory, which might be my new standard for success. It’s enough that director Elizabeth Banks should get some more opportunities (just checked IMDB, she’s busy). Screenwriter Jimmy Warden should also get some more scripts produced, although now that I look he’s apparently already set to both write and direct his next movie, ‘Borderline.’ I always question writers moving to directing so early in their careers, but on the other hand the script was on the 2020 Black List, so fingers crossed I guess.
The original incident that this movie takes inspiration from happened in 1985, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the producing duo of Lord and Miller announced they were developing Warden’s script as a horror-comedy. For some reason I keep running into Lord and Miller, and despite generally liking everything I’ve seen with their names bolted on I’m starting to get a bit weary of the pair. They originally approached Radio Silence Productions, the company behind ‘Ready or Not’ and the last two ‘Scream’ movies. They turned down ‘Cocaine Bear’ to make ‘Scream (2022),’ which worked out pretty well for them. Then, early in 2021, Universal Pictures announced they’d acquired the rights to the movie and that Elizabeth Banks would direct. For such a relatively high-profile movie there’s a worrying number of production company slates during the opening credits, but I think the film managed to handle being pulled in so many different directions well enough.
This, to me, is a quintessential three-and-a-half out of five stars movie. I’ve always been the kind of person who reads reviews of movies for their own sakes. At the time of writing I own three different compilations of Roger Ebert’s reviews, as well as books by Anthony Lane, Pauline Kael, James Harvey, etc. Obviously, I have not seen the vast majority of movies they write about, but I read their books anyways. Good writing explains itself well enough. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of my favorite movies are the ones that are well-made, fun, and have a firm grasp of the subject matter and what they’re trying to accomplish. Grabbing randomly from Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2004, here is a selection of 3 out of 4 star movies (Ebert doesn’t go to five stars): ‘The Salton Sea,’ ‘Brotherhood of the Wolf,’ and ‘The Fast and the Furious.’ That is a solid set of movies. What strikes me about this set of films is that they know what they are and what they’re doing. They take the basics of their genres (in this case crime noir, historical adventure, and ‘Point Break’) and elevate them just enough that you’re pleasantly surprised and entertained. Examples of similar movies that don’t work would include the 2011 ‘Conan the Barbarian’ and ‘Cabin Fever,’ both of which Ebert gave one and a half stars. Then you get the really good four star genre shit, like ‘Se7en’ and ‘Inception.’ It’s a continuum, is what I’m saying, and there’s a very satisfied feeling you get from watching a movie and realizing that it accomplished exactly what it set out to do.
The reviews for ‘Cocaine Bear’ were decidedly mixed. It got a 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems about right, and a 54% on Metacritic, which seems low. It opened above expectations, which speaks to the marketing campaign, and dropped a decent 54% in its second weekend, which shows that people liked it enough to recommend it to others. Since it made a decent profit, there’s been some annoying sequel talk, like ‘Cocaine Alligator.’ Without the slim hook of ‘based on a true story’ and the surprise of the title, that’d just be pushing the joke past funny and into being an Asylum original for the SyFy channel. Good luck getting Keri Russell for that.
Humor is a tricky thing to pin down, and a lot my my justification for liking this movie is that I generally found it funny. For me it struck a decent, mildly absurdist tone throughout that winked a little at the audience but never went too far into becoming tiresome. It’s a fairly shaggy screenplay, establishing a few rough groups of characters and their reasons for converging on the same section of the woods, then throws in a bear and boatloads of cocaine. These groups range from drugs dealers specifically following up on the abandoned cocaine to a group of burnouts who hang around the forest robbing people to Russell’s mom searching for her plot-conveniently missing daughter.
In its best moments the movie establishes an agreeable rhythm as a low-stakes comedy of manners. In what must have been a blessing to the budget a large portion of this movie is set in the woods. This means that a lot of screentime is spent watching characters walk down forest paths, have confrontations at forest gazebos, or hide in forest caves. The thing about forests is that, generally speaking, not a lot of money and effort has to be spent on set dressing or even lighting, if you get lucky with the weather. That does drop the visual splendor of the movie quite a bit, but it forces the script to make the time we spend with these characters more interesting. Most of the salary went into the CGI bear anyways, might as well distract us with decent writing.
The plot is utterly basic: a plane drops a bunch of packages of cocaine over a national park, a bear gets into it and goes crazy, chaos ensues. I want to focus on two of the characters: Eddie, played by Alden Ehrenreich, and Henry, played by Christian Convery. These two are strangers for almost the entire length of the movie and their storylines are completely separate from each other until the climax. Eddie is the sad sack son of the drug dealer who owns the abandoned cocaine. He’s roused from a depression over the death of his wife by his friend and fellow dealer Daveed, played well by O’Shea Jackson Jr., to go recover the cocaine. They then wander towards the abandoned drugs, bickering and arguing about anything and everything as they go.
Plot eventually happens to them, including an armed standoff with a cop, but what I like is how low-stakes and discursive most of their scenes are. Eddie is mopey and surly but not unreasonably so, Daveed tries to cajole him into feeling better, and the two have a nice rapport that makes us like them both. Throughout the movie characters bounce off of each other in weird ways. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s annoying, but it’s almost always somewhat interesting. The two run into some local criminals, and after a deliberately awkward fight scene they recruit one of them as a guide. As they walk along the criminal and Eddie start to bond a little, annoying Daveed. They get distracted by tangents, argue about minutiae, and it’s all done well enough that we’re along for the ride. None of them are even aware that the bear exists until a full hour into the movie.
Henry’s a little trickier. He’s played well by Convery and somehow manages to jump back and forth between being an amusingly precocious child and an annoyingly precocious child. His journey through the movie is the inverse of Eddie’s, in that encounters the bear early on and spends the rest of the movie trying to avoid it. Henry is saddled with a lot of lines that are supposedly funny because a kid is saying them, which almost never works. In what’s possibly a nod to being set in 1985 he’s also a sweary little shit in the same way as the kids from ‘Goonies’ or ‘Stand By Me.’ He and Keri Russell have a decent dynamic where the dual issues of her missing daughter and the fact that he’s not her kid causes her to half-ass a lot of her parenting around him. They’re never portrayed as equals, but they do get into subjects like drug use and death and they have a decent rhythm. Unfortunately, he’s involved in a lot of the more jokey-joke humor in the movie, which doesn’t really work. He is shown on screen trying to eat an entire mouthful of cocaine, though, and that’s not nothing.
The reason the characters of Eddie and Henry stick out to me is that it shows the kind of choices the writer was making. The reason this movie needs as many quotation marks around the phrase “based on a true story” as possible is because that while a bear did eat some cocaine thrown out of a plane back in 1985 in reality it immediately died and most of the cocaine was never found. That means that, in the screenplay, once the bear meets the cocaine you are free to make up whatever bullshit you can possibly think of, within the budget. Coming up with characters is easy: half of the cast can be after the drugs, the other half can be people who just happen to be in the woods, and you start riffing after that, which is when it can get fun. Keri Russell’s character is a slight variation on “tough 80’s mom,” but there’s enough complexity there that you can tell why she took the part. Margo Martindale eats up an odd role as the local park ranger who goes from flirtatious to rageful to enthusiastically homicidal. Ray Liotta has the least to do as a fairly generic gangster, but even he has a small subplot about being a lousy babysitter.
There are any number of versions of this movie that could be made. It could be a gripping drama, a survival adventure, a depraved pitch-black comedy. It could go absurd, go found-footage horror, it could be a Wes Anderson style stop motion meditation on mortality. Just about none of those would have gotten made, though, certainly not with this cast and with this budget. Much of the criticism of this movie involves its modest ambitions, criticizing it more for the movie it could or should have been instead of what they did make, which is based on a script that they were able to secure financing for. What the characters of Eddie and Henry tell me is that this is a script that knows the basics. The writer knows we need to have stock characters like a grieving father to provide an emotional core to the story and a plucky comic relief kid that gets scared so the audience does too. He can play around the edges with them, like using the excuse of the movie already being rated R to show kids doing coke and swearing, or portraying the park ranger as being way too quick to start shooting. I don’t mean to overstate things, these are not well-rounded and complete people up onscreen, they are plot and joke vehicles, but they’re done better than they often are.
One genuine criticism I have for the movie is that it has trouble maintaining a tone. During the attack scenes the move shifts into much darker territory. It still has the same comedy rhythm as before but now instead of one-liners we get gore. The centerpiece of the entire movie is a scene halfway through when EMTs arrive in the immediate aftermath of a bear attack. It starts inside the ranger station and ends with the bear chasing down the ambulance and killing everyone inside. We see people die on screen in fairly horrible ways and the deadpan framing and reaction cuts tell us very clearly that we’re supposed to be laughing at the carnage. It’s then very noticeable when the movie hard shifts back to the more breezy tone of the rest of the film. At one point the bear collapses unconscious on top of Eddie and the next few minutes are spent sweatily trying to wring comedy out of a sub-sitcom premise. With a title like ‘Cocaine Bear’ I can hardly claim surprise at comedic violence, but I was surprised at how gently absurd the rest of the comedy was. The contrast was striking and distracting.
The more I nail it all down with words the more I’m talking myself out of my fairly positive initial reaction. It’s entirely possible that I went in with such low expectations that clever writing and decent acting were enough to flip me to enjoying it. Others may regret the movie that wasn’t made, I can only watch the movie before me, and what I watched was fine. It makes me mildly curious about what Elizabeth Banks is going to do next, although I think I’m fine without watching ‘Pitch Perfect 2’ and ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ her previous movies. It also made me a fan of Alden Ehrenreich, though I also think I’m fine skipping ‘Han Solo.’
