Genre: Comedy/Horror
Premise: (from IMDB) An oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converge on a forest where a huge black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine.
About: A couple of interesting tidbits about this one. A writer named Jimmy Warden wrote it. His only writing credit is as a co-writer on The Babysitter sequel. Now, you may remember who wrote the original Babysitter, Scriptshadow’s very own unhealthy obsession in screenwriter form, Brian Duffield. Brian Duffield, by the way, is a producer on Cocaine Bear. Jimmy Warden was an actor on the original Babysitter. So, if you connect the dots, Duffield and Warden met on Babysitter, became chummy, which led to Warden co-writing the sequel, and then when Warden wrote this, the first person he took it to was Duffield. Then you have Elizabeth Banks directing (she called the choice “a potential career-killer”) and Phil Lord and Chris Miller shepherding the project (which would explain casting their Han Solo actor, Alden Ehrenreich, as Eddie).
Writer: Jimmy Warden
Details: 95 minutes
The new game plan for every movie project in Hollywood is to set box office prospects LOOOWWWW. Cocaine Bear made 23 million dollars this weekend, which, an an average box office enthusiast, you would say was LOW. But here’s the trick. Over the week, the trades talked about how Cocaine Bear would be lucky to make 18 million. LUCKY, they said!
Then you make 23 million and your movie is, all of a sudden, a superstar. But is Bear’s high/low 23 million the story of the weekend or is it Ant-Man 70% drop-off? Marvel. Dude. What are you doin’ man? Time to focus on making good movies again.
Okay, Cocaine Bear. Good? Bad? Strange? Cocainey?
Cocaine Bear is set in 1985 where some drug plane was flying along and, for whatever reason, they needed to ditch all the cocaine they were transporting so they threw it into the Tennessee woods below. Low and behold, a bear came along, ate it, got really high, and decided to go on a killing spree.
Meanwhile, two factions of people are wandering around the woods at this time. There’s Eddie and Daveed, two doofus criminals ordered to go into the woods and retrieve this cocaine for the guy who was shipping it. Daveed is the muscle and Eddie… well, Eddie is having a full on breakdown because his girlfriend just died.
Elsewhere in the Tennessee wilderness is Sari, who I guess is supposed to be a redneck but she’s the most soft-around-the-edges redneck I’ve ever seen. Her 12 year old daughter, Dee-Dee, who is also supposed to be a redneck even if she looks straight out of Central Casting, runs off into the woods and Sari must find her. She meets up with an aging female park ranger who’s trying to get it on with a young flamboyant tree scientist and is angry that Sari has just cockblocked her.
The bear lurks around, killing people left and right, in the goriest of ways. Because he has to. He’s high! But I thought cocaine suppressed appetite. Maybe I’m not supposed to think that deep. The real bear died 30 seconds after ingesting the cocaine so we’re already straining credibility here. Suspension of disbelief sushmension of sushbelief. As I review I read best sums it up, the rest of the movie, “Pretty much does exactly what you think it’s going to do.”
Cocaine Bear is what happens when the screenwriter does a pretty good job but the director fails him. Because I could see a lot of this movie working if it had funnier actors. But Elizabeth Banks really dropped the ball when it came to casting. It’s something you might miss on because none of the actors are actually that bad. But none of them are funny either.
This is a movie that needed legit comedic actors. Not these tweeners who only dip their toes in comedy once in a while. So many of these scenes depend on these actors being able to riff with each other while the bear either lurks close by or inserts himself into their activities.
I mean there’s an entire scene where the drug dealers and a cop are having a showdown with the cop stuck on top of a gazebo and the drug dealers are down on the ground where they’re in danger of being attacked by the bear. At one point the bear passes out on top of Ed, trapping him. It had to have been a 10 minute scene of all dialogue. And while the scenario was funny in spirt, the actors just weren’t able to make you – you know – LAUGH.
All I could think about was if Zack Galifianakis or Ed Helms or Adam Devine or Jonah Hill were in the movie, how much funnier the scene would’ve been. Because those guys actually understand the comedy DNA. These guys are just saying memorized lines. With the exception of Alden Ehrenreich, who was at least fully committed to his role.
A better example may be the trailer that played in front of Cocaine Bear called Mafia Mamma. It was a solid comedy premise. A suburban woman gets the call that she’s been chosen to take over her deceased grandfather’s crime business. She’d never even spoken to her grandfather so she’s completely out of her league in this world. And that’s, of course, where all the comedy comes from.
The problem is that the lead is played by Toni Collette! One of the best dramatic actresses of our time. So every single comedy beat in the trailer feels off. Cause she’s not a true comedian. All you can think is how much better the movie would be with Melissa McCarthy in the lead. Which is exactly how Cocaine Bear plays out, exact times 10 because none of the actors are right for their parts.
I mean there’s this one scene where Daveed beats up a group of druggies in a bathroom and because O’Shea Jackson is not a comedian, we have NO idea if this scene is supposed to incite fear or if we’re supposed to be laughing. There were half a dozen scenes like that.
I can’t help but think that this is the result of the drastically changing landscape of feature film comedy. It seems to have sent all our good comedy actors off in other directions because they can’t depend on that feature comedy money anymore. So maybe it’s harder to lure these people back to comedy films on the rare occasion you’re making one.
Also, the movie is tonally all-over-the-place. And, going off of Warden’s interviews, I’m going to have to blame that one on him. This from his interview with Indiewire:
“With [producers Phil] Lord and [Chris] Miller, with Elizabeth Banks, and with Universal behind it, there wasn’t much in there that I wrote that they were like, ‘You just went too far. We’re not doing that,’” he said. “It would’ve been, ‘Hey, maybe we shouldn’t have 12-year-olds do cocaine in the woods.’ Every time when I was hitting these set pieces, I was like, ‘I just need to one up. I want somebody to tell me to tone it down.’ And they never did.”
They should’ve.
Then you had the gore:
“I write a lot of movies like this, where it’s like you can take it up to a certain line, and if you straddle that line, you’re going to make people feel uncomfortable, but if you go over that line, you’re going to make people laugh,” Warden said. “So, with the gore, in a certain respect, if we toned it down at all, it may not have worked as well with the comedy.”
He’s dead wrong about this.
There’s a scene where this nice young lady ambulance driver who we like is trying to race away from the bear, ends up hitting a tree at 60 miles per hour, flies out of the windshield, straight towards the camera, tumbles around until she stops, only her face in the frame, and the life goes out from her eyes.
Yikes. This is comedy?? This shot that could’ve easily been lifted from Saving Private Ryan. For crying out loud, get your tone under control. Sheesh!
As you can see, there’s no one thing that kills Cocaine Bear. It’s all the little things. The RT score is wrong, I think, because people really want to like this movie. And so did I. This is the kind of idea that’s perfect for the spec script market. But this mish-mash of issues the writer and director inadvertently created for themselves is too much for the film to overcome. It’s messy. It’s unsettling. But most importantly, it’s not funny enough.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Laziness pays! Cocaine Bear was born by its writer avoiding writing.
What’s our favorite screenwriting avoidance activity? The internet! Warden was looking through the internet where he stumbled upon the Cocaine Bear story and thought it would make a perfect movie. So, the next time you decide to avoid writing, AVOID IT WITH PURPOSE! Look around for those weird stories that just might – JUST MIGHT – yield a great movie idea.
