In Motion #28 - Cocaine Bear

Stupid Prizes for Stupid Winners

I’m going to start this one off with a story, because I love stories: I was once obsessed with video games (I still play them, but only when I’ve clocked enough productivity during the day to earn some pure non-productivity). I played horror games, I played shooters, I played all of those Lego Star Wars games (there’s more than you think). Early morning weekends and late night stay-uppers were my golden time. During the heights of the pandemic lockdown, I was up into the wee hours of the night before my birthday crawling to the end of Shadow of the Colossus. Now, being a fan of video games means that you’re inevitably going to be a fan of video games that haven’t been released yet. An insane amount of gamer culture (ugh) is built around pre-release hype, around celebrating and praising games before they’re even finished yet. Yes, it’s very stupid. Too bad I didn’t realize how stupid until about two years ago, when I decided to roll the dice and go all-in on a game that hadn’t hit the shelves yet. It was called Cyberpunk 2077. Things didn’t end up well for Cyberpunk 2077. On Christmas Day I received my copy of the game, unopened and prestine. It remained that way, unopened and prestine, when it got shipped back to whatever Amazon assembly line it came from. It might still be unopened and prestine to this day, becoming increasingly mummified in its original plastic wrap.

As a general rule, I don’t like signing my heart away to something that has a good chance of ending poorly. As a result of this pretty rational rule, I don’t end up going all-in on that many things. I went all-in on the 49ers this year, who were a sure thing until they suddenly weren’t. I went all-in on Spectre back in 2015, which was never a sure thing despite my best attempts to convince myself otherwise. I went all-in on Dune, and even read the book; I honestly don’t remember much of the movie, which is strange for a guy who has a working interest in remembering movies. The track record isn’t exactly spot-less. Most of the best things I encounter sneak up on me. I bought Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot on a whim at Target, I watched Midnight Mass because my mom kept raving about it, etc etc. Love and joy is rarely planned because it’s almost impossible to plan it. It has to happen naturally, which is maybe why so many people end up so miserable. Either that or economic inquality. Probably a bit of both.

I was all-in on Cocaine Bear. I didn’t obsessively watch the trailer like I had for other movies, but I definitely watched it more than once. It’s rare now that Hollywood manages to crank something out that takes glee in its own originality, and here comes a film about a bear zonked out of its mind on coke that starts with the Universal logo. You can probably understand why the film’s been rising higher and higher on my radar since Thanksgiving (this very newsletter’s been penciled-in for weeks). Maybe it’s been high on yours, in which case I urge you to stop reading this right now. Happiness can be hard, and I don’t want to rob any of it from any of you. So if you want to see Cocaine Bear, a movie that is certainly about a bear high on cocaine, please do so. I’m not going to stop you. I’m not going to beg and plead that you save your hard-earned time and money. I’ll advise you to so do, but I’m not going to lose sleep if you don’t. People should enjoy things they want to enjoy. Maybe some of you will suceed where I failed…

Ugh, forget it. Cocaine Bear is awful. It sucks, I’m sorry. It’s a comedy with only one joke, and a horror movie with only one scary idea. It’s like paying money to go bowling, only for you to twist your ankle and spend the whole night watching that lame friend of a friend yack about Star Wars and chuck endless gutterballs. But rest assured: like a con-artist with nothing but lint in their pockets, director Elizabeth Banks & her merry-band of hacky cohorts do their damn best to rub their two ideas together for all that they’re worth. If you think that there’s more to this movie than meets the eye: no, there’s less. Cocaine Bear is a monument to its own marketing campaign, seemingly reverse-engineered backwards from its social media reaction without anybody actually bothering to have a real idea for a movie in the first place. I can see it now…

Int. Hollywood Board Room - Day

A bunch of executives conked-out on dramamine sit around a table.

Tim: “Nothing is making money in theaters anymore. All anybody wants to do is watch 10-hour Netflix shows. John, you got any ideas?”

John: “What about a movie where Will Ferrell voices a dog that wants to bite somebody’s penis off?”

Tim: “That’s fine, John, thank you. Anybody else? Craig?”

Cynthia: “Craig’s asleep.”

Tim: “Wake up, Craig.”

Craig: “Huh?”

John: “He’s asking about movie ideas.”

Tim: “Preferably one that we can advertise on TikTok.”

Craig: “Well my kid likes memes.”

Cynthia: “My kid likes memes too.”

Tim: “Yeah, people love those goddamn memes. Anybody got a meme lying around here somewhere?”

Craig: “I dunno about a meme, but my buddy Jim wrote a script about a bear on cocaine?”

Cynthia: “A what?”

Craig: “A bear on cocaine.”

Tim: “Did you just say ‘a bear on cocaine’?”

Craig: “Yeah. A bear on cocaine.”

Tim: “Quick, call the President of Hollywood! We’ve got a hit on our hands!”

Now, this is obviously not how Cocaine Bear came into being. I’m sure that Jimmy Warden genuinely thought he had a good idea while writing this movie. I’m sure producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, in between counting piles of Spider Man money, really liked whatever Warden’s pitch was. And it’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that Elizabeth Banks really thought she’d be able to come out on the other end of this with a good movie in her hands. But if Cocaine Bear really had been concocted by a bunch of trend-chasing dramamine-munching Hollywood execs just like in that stupid little scene I wrote, it would’ve come out looking exactly like the movie I saw in theaters last week. There’s nothing in Cocaine Bear to suggest that anybody involved thought they were making an actual movie. Every performance is tuned to the frequency of an SNL Digital Short (with an exception fortunately allowed for the great Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and every shot has the approximate beauty of your typical Los Angeles back alley. Is that what people are paying for these days? A 95-minute-long SNL Digital Short? If I’m correct, the year is 2023: I can watch 95 minutes-worth of SNL and College Humor from the comfort of my own home. sitting on my ass and paying a lot less for snacks. Jimmy Warden must’ve given a hell of a pitch.

So what the hell is Cocaine Bear actually about? Well yes, it’s about a bear that stumbles upon some thrown-out-of-a-crashing-plane-by-a-high-Matthew-Rhys cocaine, snorts it, and proceeds to kill a bunch of annoying idiots. But these annoying idiots have a glut of subplots that the film pretends it’s interested in (ranging from Keri Russell trying to find her rebellious little shit of a daughter, to Alden Ehrenreich & Ice Cube Jr. trying to locate the rest of the white stuff, to Margo Martindale trying to pork Jesse Tyler Ferguson for unknown reasons). But the film isn’t actually interested in any of this. It’s really only interested in repeating its premise ad-naseum, creating as many opportunities as possible for its needlessly-huge cast of characters to comment on the fact that, yes, a bear somehow got high on cocaine.Well, you just don’t see this everyday! Isn’t it crazy, folks? What a weird, wild world we live in! Weren’t the 80’s stupid? Eventually we get to the hilarious, absolutely gut-busting scene where the titular high-flying mammal lays directly on top of Ehrenreich, and he comments that he knows she’s a female bear because, get this, he’s touching the bear’s private parts. I’m so glad I spent gift card money seeing this stupid thing instead of actual cash.

Look, I’m no snob. I like stupid movies. Some of my favorite movies are stupid movies that were made by idiots. Do you think I play video games because I find them intellectually stimulating? No, I play them because I’m a dumb boy that likes to see things go boom. I went into Cocaine Bear with zero expectations aside from one: that the movie would own its stupid presence and have as much fun with it as possible. That expectation was not met. It was missed and not by a short distance. Banks, an actor first and foremost, frequently makes a common mistake that actor-directors make: not making their movie visually interesting. Most of them don’t view stories like designers do; they’re actors. They’re perpetual diggers. They work from the inside-out. But you absolutely positively cannot make a genre film like Cocaine Bear, already disinterested in human beings, also disinterested in looking cool. Because if you have neither style nor substance, what’s left? Certainly not the CGI bear, which looks like crap. How can it look like crap? How could somebody let that happen? That’s your one gimmick! You can’t nail your one gimmick?

But none of these problems bothered me. I’ve seen bad movies before. Cocaine Bear was more than bad; it made me feel bad. I think it’s because Elizabeth Banks hates people. Maybe I’m wrong; I’m pretty sure the reason she cast Matthew Rhys in a non-speaking cameo was because her lead actress happens to be married to Rhys. But I don’t think Banks likes normal people (kind of like how Michael Bay hates normal people, but in movies that actually look & sound interesting). Much of the “humor” of Cocaine Bear revolves around good-natured people suffering for no reason other then the idea that watching them suffer is supposed to be funny. In what will surely become the film’s most “iconic” scene, a couple of paramedics find the bear in a ruined outpost, and are then chased by it in their ambulance. While I won’t give any particular spoilers, I will note that the scene involves some rather cruel deaths for some of those non-bear characters. We’re supposed to laugh as they squeal like babies, laugh as they fail to escape death, laugh as their bodies are ripped apart, laugh as the light goes out of their eyes. I don’t know if it’s just the state of mind I’ve been in or what, but I didn’t find anything funny about seeing people I have no reason to dislike get mangled on-screen. That’s not funny. That’s just cruelty. I have no patience for cruelty. But Elizabeth Banks apparently does. I guess you’d have to in Hollywood. Bully for her.

Cocaine Bear doesn’t deserve to be successful. It opened at #1 at the box office, which isn’t really much in the month of February (especially in the hellscape of the 2023 theatrical industry), but it’s still something. It doesn’t deserve that. It deserves to be forgotten. It deserves to lose. Forget what I said earlier; I was just trying to be polite. To the friend I texted the other night; forget that I told you to form your own opinion. Don’t bother. This movie is detestable. It thinks that watching people scream in pain is a suitable replacement for actual comedy. It thinks that the mere image of an animal, wheather real or not, is a suitable replacement for anything of actual photographic interest. Because you love animals, don’t you? You love violence, don’t you? You love being in on the joke, don’t you? This movie thinks you’re stupid. Don’t let a movie think you’re stupid, especially one called Cocaine Bear.