Cocaine Bear: A Stupid Good Movie

Bears, blood, crude humor, and cocaine. What else could you want in life? Well for this bear, cocaine is all she needs. First off, this movie is absolutely ridiculous, but in the best way possible. For a movie to be stupid good it has to do a a lot of things right in order to achieve the high prestige title. Movies such as Grown Ups, Water Boy, and Happy Madison I believe reach this goal and now I can confidently say Cocaine Bear can be added to the list, but why?

In 1985 a smuggler who is flying over a state park in Kentucky, starts throwing out tons and tons of duffel bags of cocaine into the forest below, in doing this it catches the attention of quite a few people. We see the stories of a couple of different of those people, like a mother-daughter-friend trio who gets into all kinds of trouble but is really the heart and soul of the movie in the end. Then there’s the Father-son-friend trio whos a little more complicated than the other group. Basically the father is also a smuggler for the cartel and that cocaine was his responsibly, and his son and friend are employed by him to do jobs for him. However the son who just lost his wife is sick of doing things for his abusive and manipulative father, his friend on the other hand has a bit more trouble realizing this. Then obviously the star of the show, the bear who guess what, loves the cocaine that was dropped out of that plane. The bear surprisingly though isn’t as one dimensional as the movie makes her seem at first, I’m sure the original thought of most people would be “just kill the bear” but the movie works hard to make you change your mind about that and feel empathy for the bear almost which is really weird. As the bear like isn’t a good being as it kills lots and lots of people but at the same time it doesn’t know what is going on and why this is happening, it just knows it really likes this yummy white powder. The film also tells us that the bear has cubs and it adds even more motivation for us to feel for the bear and want it to have a good ending.

Cocaine Bear knows what it is, its stupid and the movie understands that and uses that to its advantage. It uses so many types of different humor its almost impressive and every single joke left my entire theater which was filled to the brim for the movie absolutely cackling. I saw Cocaine Bear the Saturday it released in Richmond so it was a bit more crowded than our local theaters which are pretty much never full, and that I believe helped the experience of the movie quite a bit. Now what is this movie actually about.

Now that we know what this film is kinda about, lets see what this film actually does good. The best part of the film by far is the bear, the cocaine filled rampages are fantastic and leave you wanting more the entire time. I’d say these are absolutely the best part of the film and can make for some great laughs. Also as I said earlier the movie knows what it is and uses that, it knows its ridiculous and I am all for that. It also does its jokes perfectly, the visual humor is great and characters acting

which is surprisingly pretty good considering the material, making for a perfect marriage between the 2. Also some surprising things is the CGI of the bear, typically dumb horror movies has terrible VFX and its what the get made for a lot of the time, but Cocaine bear avoids this by a long shot, the cgi is fantastic and it really does throw you off.

However not everything is good for this bear. It has a pacing problem unfortunately and I think that really takes away from what this movie could’ve been. It slows itself down immensely and puts all this focus on these human characters which sometimes you really could care less about. Not to put down the actors or anything but sometimes they’re just unnecessary. This movie can go from the most over the top action scene with lots of blood, gore, and laughs to some really boring character building moment which the movie uses as an attempt to make you say “awww”. But other than that I really cant think of much else that makes this movie as bad as it should be.

Overall its a good 90 minute flick to turn your brain off, its got some issues but really who cares. This movie entertains and that’s all it wants to do. So I’d say its the perfect dumb movie. All in all id give it a surprising 7.5/10.