Elizabeth Banks’s creature comedy does what the title says roughly once every twenty minutes, and does it well. In between, a good cast stands about in a sunlit forest waiting for the next attack, and so did we.
Somewhere in the 1980s a smuggler throws duffel bags of cocaine out of a small plane over a forest and then, for reasons the opening scene explains, follows them. A black bear finds the bags. That much is roughly true, and Jimmy Warden’s script takes it from there, sending a nurse (Keri Russell) into the woods after her truant daughter, two of the smuggler’s men (Alden Ehrenreich and O’Shea Jackson Jr.) after the product, a detective (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) after the men, and a park ranger (Margo Martindale) after whatever is making that noise. Elizabeth Banks directs it as a slasher in which the killer has fur and a habit. It is decent fun. It is also slacker than 95 minutes has any right to be.
The bear is good. She is a digital creature and never quite stops being one, but she has been given a face that can hold a mood, and the mood is usually appetite. Banks stages the attacks in daylight, which is braver than it sounds. John Guleserian lights the forest bright green and full of sun, so when a limb comes off it comes off in plain view, with no shadow to hide the join. Mark Mothersbaugh scores it with the fat synthesisers of the decade and plays the joke straight, which is the right call.
The best sequence involves an ambulance, a country road and a bear that has not finished. We will not say who is in the back. It is the one stretch where Banks, Guleserian and the editor Joel Negron are plainly making the same film: the camera sits low and level with the tarmac, the cuts land on the impact rather than just before it, and the gag builds for a couple of minutes with hardly a line of dialogue to lean on. We laughed, loudly and a little guiltily, because what we were laughing at was a person being dragged along a road at speed. Then we sat through most of a reel waiting to laugh like that again, and did not.
The humans hold up their end. Ehrenreich plays Eddie, a widower who has given up on most things, and Jackson plays Daveed, the friend sent to keep him upright, and their bickering is the nearest the film has to a heart. Ray Liotta, in one of his last performances, is Syd, the man who sent them, with the same unblinking menace he brought to everything; the film hardly knows what to do with him once he arrives. Martindale’s Ranger Liz is the funniest person on screen, a woman with a rifle and a crush, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Peter, the wildlife inspector she has the crush on, is the ideal man to be embarrassed by her. Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery, as the two children who skipped school to paint a waterfall, are better than the material, and the film’s most nervous scene is those two deciding what to do with a brick of something white.
The trouble is everything between the attacks. Warden gives the forest too many people and all of them the same errand, so the middle hour is largely different groups walking through the same trees towards the same bear. A pair of hikers (Kristofer Hivju and Hannah Hoekstra) are there to demonstrate the problem. A gang of local teenagers are there to be irritating, and are. Negron, so exact in the ambulance, elsewhere lets scenes run a beat past the joke, and the dialogue has a loose, chatty feel that reads as improvised even where it was not. Aaron Haye’s ranger cabin and Tiziana Corvisieri’s clothes place the decade without fuss. A film called Cocaine Bear should not have a lull. This one has three.
Snakes on a Plane (2006) had one image and stretched it across a whole film. This has one image and stretched it across a whole marketing campaign, and then had to find 95 minutes to put behind it. The reviews so far sit about where we do, with some calling it a riot and some a bore, and we think both are right about different twenty-minute stretches.
See it late, with friends and something to drink, and be prepared to talk over the middle. It runs 95 minutes and carries a 15, which seems about right for a film in which a small boy tastes cocaine to see what the fuss is about.
