You might remember, back in 2006, a film phenomenon called Snakes on a Plane. Samuel L. Jackson played an FBI agent flying a mob witness from Honolulu to Los Angeles, taking on a planeload of venomous snakes that had been released as a murder weapon.
It was as silly as it sounds, but it was one of the best examples of a film selling you exactly what it said on the tin.
There was a plane and there were snakes. You can’t say you didn’t know what you were letting yourself in for.
Photo: Screenshot
This year’s equivalent is Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear – a comedy horror about a black bear in an American national park who has stumbled on some lost bags of the illicit white powder and developed a taste for it.
Woe betide anyone or anything that comes between her and her Colombian marching powder.
The national park is in Chattahoochee in Georgia and the bear roams around a landmark improbably called Blood Mountain. But I looked it up – it’s real.
Full marks to the filmmakers for realism there.
When a plane carrying lots and lots of duffel bags full of cocaine bricks – enough to build a decent sized retaining wall or barbecue patio to use the New Zealand system of measurement – goes down, the pilot ditches the cargo but his parachute fails to open. It’s now open season on all that blow.
It’s 1985, so much hilarity is assumed at all the haircuts and fashion statements and an equivalent amount of nostalgia for the music. Depeche Mode is prominent and composer Mark Mothersbaugh gets to pretend to be Miami Vice era Harold Faltermeyer.
While the bear is getting higher and higher, several groups are closing in.
Two middle-schoolers are wagging school for the day to go and visit Secret Falls – they’re also real by the way, marked on a map and actually kind of famous, so not actually all that secret – but they stumble on one of those bricks just before the bear gets there.
The owners of the drugs are on the hook to the cartel if they can’t recover it all so there’s a degree of urgency on their part – O’Shea Jackson, Alden Ehrenreich and the late Ray Liotta are the bickering criminals.
A park ranger – played by the great Margo Martindale – is wanting to find some quiet time to be with environmentalist Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) but ends up helping the mother of one of the kids – played by Keri Russell – which is a frustrating exercise for all concerned.
Until the bear turns up again, that is, when frustrating doesn’t even begin to cover things.
I almost forgot Isaiah Whitlock Jr. as Dave, the cop who is hot on the heels of the drug dealers and who adds a layer of complication to proceedings.
Unfortunately, for me, I was reminded of a film I saw much too young – possibly unlawfully but definitely unwittingly – called Grizzly about a massive bear on the loose in a state park.
Pretty traumatising for an eight-year-old and I can report that Cocaine Bear leaves nothing behind in terms of gore and supposedly amusing dismemberments and disembowellings. Hilarious.
For the first hour or so I found myself doing what I often do when I’m not terribly engaged in the story and don’t care much for the people. I get distracted and look at other things, the background, who is playing small roles.
For example, is that Keri Russell’s husband Matthew Rhys in a cameo as the failed parachutist at the beginning? Why, yes it is.
The film was mostly shot in Ireland which is why there are little tidbits of Irishness snuck into the set decoration.
The fast-food restaurant where we first meet Ray Liotta at the beginning is leprechaun-themed, for example, and there’s a giant roadside billboard that appears a couple of times advertising a bar called O’Hagan’s.
But, by the final third – it’s only 95 minutes long which is a blessing – when all the extraneous comedy characters have been disposed of and we are left with two mothers determined to protect two sets of cubs and only one of them is out of her gourd on coke – well, I started to find things a lot more engaging.
It actually does feel like a different film at that point, one that cares a little for its characters and encourages you to do so too. A little.
Cocaine Bear is rated R16 for graphic violence, drug use & offensive language. (a lot of the cursing is done by children which bothered me more than I thought it would. Am I being too prudish?) Anyway, the film is playing in cinemas across Aotearoa now.
