The best thing about this movie is its name, both the original – Cocaine Bear – and the witty Hebrew version. Both tell us in the clearest way what the film is about, and what its plot is. The film itself – produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller who created some of the funniest comedies of recent years (“21 Jump Street”, “The Lego Movie”) – is also pretty cool, at least part of it, before it gets lost in the woods.
The opening titles announce that the film is based on a true story, which is somewhat true. The known details, reported in the 1985 news releases, are that a drug smuggler named Andrew C. Thornton II threw dozens of packages of cocaine from his plane, then fell to his death with an unopened parachute. Three months later, the corpse of a black bear was found in the woods of Georgia, along with forty open plastic containers of cocaine. A stuffed bear, nicknamed “Cocaine Bear”, is on display today at a mall in Kentucky.
A bear that died from cocaine poisoning is a sad and angry story about another animal that became a victim of the crimes of human society. Stolen Bear, on the other hand, is a crazy comedy. A stolen bear that eats people, it’s a horror comedy. And with the bear actually being a bear with cubs, we also get such cute comedy, similar to the heartwarming videos circulating on social media. Only the road there is lined with severed limbs.
The opening of “Bear Material” presents us with the starting point described above, and a host of characters whose paths will cross in the Chattahoochee Forest in the state of Georgia – similar to Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods”, only with grunts instead of songs. The first are couples who go on a trip before the wedding. They both have some kind of Nordic accent (Olaf is Christopher Hive, remembered as the red-haired giant Thurmond from Game of Thrones) and are funny like that. It’s clear that they won’t make it to the wedding safely, either because she doesn’t want his brother to play at the wedding, or because the cocaine bear is waiting for them in the forest. The meeting with the drugged bear is startling and funny and gruesome, and serves as a preparation for the following meetings.
The other characters in the film get more screen time before they are torn apart. All of them are funny in different ways, and are well played by a successful group of actors. But despite the fact that this is a seemingly limitless comedy, it is clear to us in advance that there are rules that cannot be broken in a Hollywood film – one of them is that children are not killed, all the more so if they are cute. Didi (12-year-old Brooklyn Prince from “The Choking Ring”) sneaks out of school and drags her best friend Henry (13-year-old Christian Conbury, who has appeared in more than thirty movies and TV series) after her, and together they make their way to the hidden waterfall in the forest. When her mother Sherry (Keri Russell), a nurse at a hospital, discovers that Didi hasn’t arrived at school, she goes looking for her in the woods. A pink outfit from head to toe, which is hard to believe was also fashionable in the eighties, makes Sherry look like the second mother in the film – the black bear.
Ray Liotta, in the last film he managed to complete before his sudden death at the age of 67, plays the head of a criminal organization who sends his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and one of his soldiers named David (rapper O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to locate the lost packages of cocaine. Eddie is still grieving the death of his beloved wife, and his dad thinks that getting back into business is just what he needs to recover. In such a crooked way it turns out that he is right, and the dynamic between Eddie and David is funny all the way through. Also the policeman Bob (Isaiah Whitlock Jr. from “The Undercover” – the one who is known to say “Shiyite”) comes to the forest in search of those who are looking for the drugs. The ranger is Margo Martindale, who puts on lipstick and perfume for the arrival of nature lover Jesse Taylor Ferguson (“Modern Family”), and she’s also funny. As you remember, Martindale, Russell and Matthew Rhys (here in a small role as the drug smuggler in the opening scene) played together in the less funny series “The Americans”. The bear itself was created on a computer, and more than once it looks and behaves like a character in an animated film.
This is Elizabeth Banks’ third film (full-length) as a director, after “Pitch Perfect 2” and “Charlie’s Angels”. She demonstrates good timing here, and a gallows sense of humor, and the film manages to be stressful and funny at the same time. A wild action scene involving an ambulance is the comedic highlight of the film. But all of this is true for about two-thirds of it. At a certain point, as the characters who are still alive go deeper and deeper into the forest, the humor fades, the script loses its hold on any plot logic, and the turn to sentimentality dulls the impact. The end credits dedicate the film to Ray Liotta, whose role he plays here is a kind of parody of his film career since he played a mobster in “The Good Guys” back in 1990. All in all it’s not a bad ending chord.
3 stars. Cocaine Bear Director: Elizabeth Banks. With Ray Liotta, Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Alden Ehrenreich, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Isaiah Whitlock Jr. USA 2023, 95 min.