Cocaine Bear (2023)

I can't decide if this movie is the good kind of stupid, or just stupid.

Starting a movie set in 1985 with a quote from Wikipedia about black bears not being territorial and if attacked you should fight back, seems to fall in the "just stupid" category. If you're gonna go to the trouble of the period appropriate cars, clothes, music, existence of pay phones, there had to be a period-appropriate field guide or encyclopedia to cite.

But, OK, that's a little thing, fine, whatever. I did laugh at several points, some of them even when it was trying to produce that reaction. The bear chasing the ambulance, for example. Elizabeth Banks clearly wanted to go over-the-top with this, and those are the parts that work the best. When it just goes to a point of absolute absurdity. The cop emptying one of the packages while the bear does a happy, awkward dance under the coke. The bear spitting out a bullet after being repeatedly shot.

The parts where Banks tries to add some depth to the potential victims, that was hit-or-miss. I suppose I wanted the two kids playing hooky to make it out alive, but I didn't really care that Dee Dee wasn't receptive to her mom dating again. Henry trying to pretend he knows all about coke was pretty funny, especially when he doubled down after eating it backfired. The stuff with Daveed and Eddie trying to recover the coke, while Eddie is mourning the death of his wife and essentially dumped his son with his dad (played by Ray Liotta), who is a drug lord, not so much. The cop not being totally satisfied with the dog he adopted, because he was expecting one he could play fetch with? Not caring about that at all.

And that stuff occupies a surprising amount of the run time. I know, you can't just have the bear running amok for 90 minutes straight (or can you?) Use it for effect, let the audience wonder when it's going to appear and what will happen then. In theory, the audience should probably want at least some of the humans to survive. Maybe. But there are points - mostly when Park Ranger Liz is trying to flirt with the wildlife guy - that I was sitting there thinking, "So where's the damn bear?"