Cocaine Bear

               
The carcass of Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear has been thoroughly picked over, but I still found something to gnaw on. I don't believe this was a foredoomed project even though, like Snakes on a Plane, the title promises a one dimensional premise. The makers could have made this film an 80s period comedy, a grotesque comedy, a survival tale or even a subjective film from the bear's point of view like Jean-Jacques Annaud's singular The Bear. However, Jimmy Warden's screenplay lacks any consistent tone and the film is an easily shrugged off kluge.

The film commences with a drug dealer tossing satchels of cocaine into the Chattanooga National Forest from his burning prop plane. The dealer conks his head on the plane door before he can open his parachute and falls to his death. All this is backgrounded by the 80s ear worm of Jefferson Starship's "Jane", seemingly promising us a satire of the cheesy and coked out America of the 1980s. The song also served as the theme to another Elizabeth Banks affiliated satire, the reboot of Wet Hot American Summer which was, at least, more consistent in tone than Cocaine Bear.  Two bands of miscreants are soon searching the forest for the contraband . Both of these groups contain dimwitted criminal types, ripe for satire, as are the goofy staffers of the park.

However, also in the park are two pre-teens skipping school. Soon, one of their mama bears (played by Keri Russell) is hot on their trail. The players all cross paths with the intoxicated bear and mild hilarity and hysteria ensues. However, the satiric tone Banks injects doesn't jibe with the children in peril part of the film. I thought that these sections of the film seemed to belong in something like The Goonies rather than an R rated comedy. Since the cocaine bear herself has two cubs, some sort of parallelism could have been drawn between the title character and Keri Russell, but that is not the type of product Cocaine Bear is. I enjoyed the broad antics that Banks elicited from her cast, particularly O'Shea Jackson Jr., Margo Martindale, and the late Ray Liotta, but Cocaine Bear is too aimless and witless to be memorable.