Cocaine Bear review: Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch the movie that’s at least as bad as it looks

Cocaine Bear. Photo / AP

Greg and Zanna watch a bear run amok and wonder why.

SCORES

Bear’s enjoyment: 5

Audience’s enjoyment: 1

SHE SAW

In honour of International Women’s Day on Wednesday, we’re reviewing a film about a bear, a female bear, that’s also directed by a woman: Elizabeth Banks. And in recognition of equal rights for all, I conclude that this film is equally as bad as many many films directed by men. In fact, the vast majority of bad movies have been directed by men. Indeed the vast majority of movies have been directed by men but if you’re going to insist on directing all the films, you’re going to have to take credit for all the bad ones too.

Cocaine Bear is based on a real event that occurred in 1985 in the Chattahoochee National Forest. A bear was found dead after consuming an unknown amount of cocaine that had been dropped into the forest from a plane manned by drug smuggler Andrew Thornton. The film is an imagining of how a coked-out bear might behave, and it’s pretty gory.

It would be pretty hard to pull off a serious horror about a bear on cocaine but, for me, this film wasn’t funny enough to pull off comedy horror either. There are some decent comedic actors in the film but despite the comically absurd premise and splatter-style gore, I didn’t crack more than a smile throughout.

Of course, comedy is subjective, and influenced by your environment, so I’m not prepared to rule out the possibility that under different circumstances, I may find this film entertaining. But on a Monday night, in a half-empty cinema, the unresponsive audience and I did not.

To its credit, Cocaine Bear is quite succinct and all action, all the time. It opens with the manic drug smuggler recklessly flinging packages of cocaine out of an aircraft before hitting his head and plummeting to his death. The bear almost immediately finds it, and – soon after – some Scandinavian backpackers, and it’s guts, severed limbs and CGI salivating bears from there.

The story is very thin, with too many characters and tacked-on backstories that compound the glaring lack of complex storytelling. Look, I’m not trying to judge this film on the same criteria as Tár or Women Talking but it also doesn’t hold a candle to this summer’s triumph of the genre, M3GAN.

Many millions of people have watched the trailer for Cocaine Bear, which has been a viral sensation. It’s so highly meme-able that it will probably succeed based on that alone. And in the lead up to International Women’s Day, I’m glad a film - even a dreadful film - directed by a woman about a woman bear looks like it will make good money.

HE SAW

This movie is not an act of imagination so much as an act of violence against our belief in ourselves as some sort of advanced species capable of doing good. Like Snakes on a Plane, Anaconda and numerous other crazed-animal-run-amok movies, this one knew its raison d’etre, which was to have people walking around looking scared, followed by intermittent fear-justifying moments. We have all the usual stuff – people standing looking frightened in one direction while the creature flashes across the screen behind them, the jump scares, the usual excess gore, the director’s usual knowing smirk at the movie’s own ludicrousness, as if their awareness of their crime of wasting our time in some way justifies it.

I had seen the preview a few weeks ago and thought it couldn’t be as terrible as it looked. Surely, I thought, nobody would make a movie based only on the strength of a funny title and a real life story that will ultimately bear no resemblance to yours. But, of course, I had underestimated Hollywood’s willingness to underestimate us.

I tried to like this movie and I wanted to like this movie. There were actually a few good things about it, but not a single one of them happened between the moment I sat down in the cinema and the moment I left. Primarily, I loved the fact it was written and directed by Elizabeth Banks, who has forced her way into a domain dominated by men with a low opinion of us, but presumably not themselves. I had hoped she would do something they hadn’t been able or willing to do, to revamp the genre, introduce some thought or nuance or something, but I was wrong.

Things that are bad about the movie: the dialogue, the story, the bear. The movie is going for camp, for ludicrousness, for an over-the-topness, but to what end? It’s not saying anything about that, and all that’s left is a series of gross-outs. We shouldn’t have gone to this movie. With about 20 minutes to go I asked Zanna if we should leave. Usually when I request a departure, she gets really annoyed, so when she didn’t even frown furiously at me, there were a hopeful few seconds when I thought I was going to be set free, but alas no. The only winner from this movie is the real-life bear who died shortly after eating a large quantity of cocaine, thus saving it from the indignity of seeing its memory desecrated on the big screen.

Cocaine Bear is in cinemas now.