Cocaine Bear (2023)

Cocaine Bear arrives with a title that does most of the work and a premise that handles the rest. Elizabeth Banks directs a Georgia forest full of drug runners, tourists, teens, and one very committed black bear who has eaten a duffel bag of smuggled cocaine and now wishes to discuss it with everyone she meets. The result is a B-movie with studio money, ninety-five minutes of escalating mayhem, and a sense of humor that never apologizes for itself. Ray Liotta appears in one of his final roles, and the film is dedicated to his memory, which lends the closing moments a strange and unearned solemnity.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is almost aggressively uninterested. O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Isiah Whitlock Jr. are in the cast and are good in it, but race is never a subject the screenplay raises, and the movie does not present their presence as a statement. No character wrestles with identity, no subplot carries a message, and the forest exists purely so that a bear can chase an ambulance down a country road. The bear herself is female, which matters to the plot in a small way, since she has cubs, but the film builds no argument on top of that fact. A woman directed it and a mother spends the runtime searching for her daughter, and neither detail is offered as a thesis.

That leaves a joke told at feature length, and a fairly disciplined one. The screenplay keeps introducing new faces, which critics found tiresome, though the film's pleasures are not located in its people. They are located in the bear, in the sound design, and in the willingness of a major studio to release something this silly. There is no sermon here. There is only a large animal and a lot of cocaine, and the movie knows exactly what it is.