Cocaine Bear

Elizabeth Banks turned a potentially funny brutal comedy into a lazy and plodding film of unlikeable characters, dysfunctional humour and zero atmosphere. The couple of fine scares and the likeable bear tearing people apart aren't enough when you spend most of the time looking at your watch for the end credits. A below-average film that scores points more for its entertaining premise than for how it's handled. (02/22/2023)

It's a shame that Elizabeth Banks took a potentially bizarre and wacky premise, where it was already decided that it would be a bad film, but I was hoping that it would at least be stupid-funny and it's kind of boring. The bear itself looks pretty cool, and the best scene is with the ambulance, which is also one of the coolest, the rest of it wasn't worth much. There's not enough gore for my taste (there was some guts and some severed limbs), but when I think of the bear attack from The Revenant, there was nothing as intense here. There is very little humour, I didn't laugh once, it's mostly cringe and insipid. By the end, I was wishing for the ending and I was struggling not to turn it off. Had I seen it in the cinema, I’d be pissed. 3/10. (03/29/2023)

This gets one less star because of the kicking of the bear cubs and because of the precisely crafted trailer, which created the impression that this poorly directed exercise in futility might actually be good. Some films are bad not in an entertaining way, but simply in an uninteresting and soul-crushing way. (04/28/2023)

Cocaine Bear could have turned out any way, given the premise and the director, and I'm quite happy it turned out to be an average black-humour slasher starring a murderous bear with a cube of cocaine for a brain. The film has a lot of humour, but it’s very uneven in places, but I had a decent time in the cinema, especially in the scenes with Margo Martindale and during the gazebo sequence. They certainly could have pushed the black-humour envelope more and didn't have to put so much family ballast into the script, but what the hell, I left the cinema feeling satisfied. (02/25/2023)