I saw the much-anticipated film “Cocaine Bear” on Feb. 26, 2023. Very loosely based on the true story of a bear in Georgia in the 1980s consuming cocaine, the film attracted a lot of attention prior to its release. I, like many people, was very excited about the film’s release. In fact, so many people in Washington wanted to see the movie that it was almost sold out its first two nights at the local theater. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the movie as much as I thought I would. 

I don’t think the film quite knew what it was trying to be; the idea of a bear getting high on cocaine and going on a rampage is sort of amusing, so I was expecting the movie to be a lot more lighthearted than it was. To make up for the premise being a little ridiculous, the movie overcompensates in the horror department. The film relies too heavily on dramatic score, jump scares and gore, which happens when a filmmaker can think of no other substantial way to truly scare an audience. Almost all the death scenes were more graphic and drawn out than they needed to be, just to increase the shock factor. This heavy focus on the horror element of the premise was also confusing considering there was almost no humor in the movie to balance out its intensity. Instead, there were only one or two jokes and the rest of the movie (I think) was actually supposed to be scary.

If director Elizabeth Banks wanted to make a good horror movie, then she might’ve made up for the subpar scares with a core group of quality characters that the audience could root for. However, there are about 12 main characters throughout the movie, which can make the audience unsure of who they’re supposed to actually care about. Some of those characters die off, of course, but not even the seven who survive are fleshed out much past their basic personality traits and surface-level motivations. Ironically (or perhaps not), I thought the best character was Cocaine Bear herself.

If the characters being bad wasn’t enough, so are the words they speak and the music that plays in the background. The dialogue and score/soundtrack left a great deal to be desired. Considering the amount of media in the last decade that has been set in the 1980s, I would think it wouldn’t be all that difficult to find inspiration for the soundtrack of the movie, or develop the period-based score past a few lines of synth. The dialogue was unmemorable.

I’m not sure how often we do ratings here at the Advocate, but I give “Cocaine Bear” (2023) two out of five stars. I liked when the bear actually did cocaine.