'Cocaine Bear' is a temporary high, but you should still do a bump

In 1985, a shipment of cocaine is dumped over a national park in Georgia. A wild black bear discovers said shipment and begins to ingest it, becoming hyper-aggressive and attacking hapless hikers. Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) and Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) are sent by their boss Syd (Ray Liotta) to recover the cocaine before a local detective (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) finds it first. Meanwhile, a nurse (Keri Russell) enters the national park in search of her daughter, who's gone missing with her friend...

With a title like 'Cocaine Bear', it's hard not to be automatically intrigued by the concept.

So many movies nowadays are prequels, reboots, remakes, soft reboots, legacy sequels, so the idea of something reasonably fresh and original is always cause for excitement. 'Cocaine Bear', given its period setting and its frequent outbursts of foul language and pitch-black comedy, attempts to harken back to the coked-up comedies of the '80s-like 'Caddyshack', '48 Hrs.', or 'Beverly Hills Cop'. There's a sense of jagged energy about 'Cocaine Bear' that few movies have nowadays, where making something slick and marketable isn't the first concern of anyone involved.

To her credit, director Elizabeth Banks knows how to corral an ensemble cast and gives equal footing and pacing to them all. Alden Ehrenreich excels as a washed-up, depressed drug dealer with O'Shea Jackson Jr. paired with him as the pragmatic and put-upon co-worker just trying to get to the end of the day alive. The great Margo Martindale and Jesse Tyler Ferguson both have an excellent dynamic as park rangers caught up in the bloody spectacle with horrifying results, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Ray Liotta both round out the cast in their own inimitable style. It's telling then that the poster and marketing material make little noise about this cast - it's the bear that's the impetus for it all.

Admittedly, the bear does look quite cheap and obvious in parts, not to mention more than a few scenes that are clearly trying to shoot around the mid-sized budget to make the most impact. Wicklow serves reasonably well as '80s Georgia, with a tacky-looking kids' restaurant and a housing estate serving for some of the exteriors as well as Avoca for the mountains themselves. All of this serves to heighten the kind of anarchic energy that 'Cocaine Bear' feeds off of and carries through its tight 95-minute runtime.

Of course, as the title suggests, the effects are temporary, it eventually becomes annoying, and when you look back over the experience, you realise that much of it was just bluster and noise. 'Cocaine Bear' is a quick, sugary bump of blood-soaked action and comedy. By no means a work of cinematic mastery, it's nevertheless an enjoyable tear through a tabloid story with more than a few embellishments worked into the bag to give it a kick.