Cocaine Bear (2023) First thing you want to know......if I actually line up at the multiplex and buy a ticket, will I get what paid for?
Most assuredly yes.
You'll get a raging, rampaging bear, hopped up to the gills from ingesting multiple bricks of coke dropped from a plane by a drug dealer.
You'll get an assortment of seriously unlucky people who, for one reason or another, find themselves in the same forest with the above mentioned Cocaine Bear.
You'll get to see more than a few of these folks ripped to shreds, dismembered and eviscerated by the above mentioned Cocaine Bear.
More importantly (and especially if the theater is packed with fellow Cocaine Bear enthusiasts) you and your fellow ticket buyers will laugh your collective asses off at the deliberate outrageous gore of the kill scenes.......with severed limbs and blood liberally splashed around to generate big yocks from the crowd.
Yes, the movie's already in on the joke of its existence on the pop culture zeitgeist. . And until it makes the dismal error of taking itself seriously in its final sequence, it does make an all out effort to exceed any expectations you imagined about it.
Simply put, it succeeds in making you laugh out loud at things no rational, civilized, decent, empathetic person should laugh at. We should all know better than to laugh at 'Cocaine Bear', right?
But hell, that's the fun of it.
Let's hand all credit to director Elizabeth Banks, who knew very well to avoid the pitfalls of making a film whose ridiculous high concept makes it a famous social media meme before anybody's even seen a frame of it.
Prime example, as we all know to our everlasting disappointment - 2006's "Snakes On A Plane", All America shared in the belly laughs generated by the film's title........until the film opened. And the film itself, mediocre, dull and not particularly well made, arrived as nothing but a tired. afterthought.
Director Banks was savvy enough to give us all what we came for.......over-the-top laughs, over-the-top carnage and over-the-top actors fully embracing the demented spirit of the whole enterprise. She only falters at the very end, when the film begins to devolve into something resembling a run-of-the-mill monster movie.
And all hail to motion capture performance artist Allen Henry for the most physically memorable role so far this year.......who so ably embodies Cocaine Bear, along with God only knows how many CGI digital artists who animated Henry into a roaring, riotous Winnie The...Boo!
Final thought....nobody should feel content to sit at home and only laugh at the idea of this movie.
It's worth going to see, so you can really enjoy the joke of it.....yes, the film's as funny as the title promises. 4 stars (****).....
(Personally, BQ looks forward to one day viewing the ultimate smackdown....."Cocaine Bear" Vs. M3GAN 3.0".....)
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