Cocaine Bear delivers ridiculous creature violence on some goofy, short-lived characters, but its lack of consistent tone and identity kept it from being everything I had hoped.
Let’s start with this: I am a massive fan of lane creature movies - Ghost Shark, Sharknado, Lavalantula, The Sand - some of my favorites. So I expected to love Cocaine Bear. Sadly, I was a little underwhelmed. It wasn’t bad for what it was, but it didn’t dazzle me as I had hoped. Two things held it back for me:
The tone inconsistently switched from a Zombieland-style ridiculous violence to a goofy crime movie to an odd family drama. Cocaine Bear had a minor identity crisis from start to finish.
The movie tried to give each character a little backstory and development. While this is generally a good thing, in a low-budget creature movie, it slows down the nonsensical violence that the audience came for in the first place. Spend time on one or two characters but not all of them. I didn’t need to know about the drug lord’s grandson or the detective’s dog. I just need to see more people get eaten 😆.
I appreciated the larger-budget kills and the oddball characters. If it continues, I will come back for a second try in this franchise, but ultimately I wasn’t high on Cocaine Bear (get it? 😜).