‘Cocaine Bear’ Review: Bear Gone Wild
metroweekly.comStretching the phrase “inspired by true events” to its bare limits, Cocaine Bear (★★★☆☆) takes off from the stranger-than-fiction real-life tale of a Kentucky drug runner who, in 1985, dumped bundles of cocaine from a plane over Georgia, then perished trying to parachute after the drugs, a large, expensive portion of which were found and somehow consumed by a 500-lb.
black bear deep in the Georgia woods.Anyone interested in the dead-serious facts of the case can grab a copy of Sally Denton’s comprehensive chronicle The Bluegrass Conspiracy, originally published in 1990.This movie, on the other hand, takes a bold leap off that plane with Thornton’s duffel bags full of brown paper-wrapped bricks of blow, and never looks back.Directed by Pitch Perfect mogul Elizabeth Banks, and scripted by Jimmy Warden, Cocaine Bear leaves no gruesome gag unturned, no outrageous one-liner untold, serving up the sort of anything-goes big-screen comedy that comes along rarely.Mid-rampage, the coke-fueled bear snorts a line off someone’s severed leg.
This ain’t National Geographic, but a Lord and Miller-produced, laugh-a-minute gorefest with a hint of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, or ’80s comedies like Ruthless People, featuring a sprawling cast of famous character actors as the various folks on the hunt for, or on the run from, the hairy, hungry coke fiend.The real kick is that Warden’s script gives award winners like Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr.
amusingly idiosyncratic characters to play. Ray Liotta, in one of his final screen roles, is a delight as Syd, the St. Louis crime boss who was meant to be on the receiving end of Thornton’s drug shipment.
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