Cocaine Bear

A bear doing rails and going on a rampage. On paper, that's either a five-minute SNL sketch or a movie that wastes two hours of your life. Somehow it's the second one, and somehow it works.

I sat down ready to roll my eyes for ninety minutes. Instead I was laughing, wincing, and occasionally going "oh, come on" at the screen in the best way possible. Funny in the spots where it needed to be funny, gory in the spots where it needed to be gory. The movie knows exactly what it is, and that's half the battle right there.

Cocaine Bear has no business being this good.

The bear is the star, obviously. CGI and everything, she absolutely sells it. I bought every swipe, every chase, every snort. When the central gimmick of your movie is a coked-up apex predator, you'd better deliver, and they delivered.

The story around the bear is more entertaining than it has any right to be. I was locked in. I cared what happened next, which is wild because the premise is basically a bumper sticker.

Now, do parts of the plot hold up under any kind of scrutiny? Not really. There were a couple of moments where, if you stuck to what actually happened in real life, the movie ends about forty minutes early. But the movie needed to keep moving, and I get it. It's a minor gripe in an otherwise really fun ride. I'm not docking much for it.

The theater was the right call on this one. Seeing it with friends, hearing a room react together to a bear absolutely losing it, that's the experience.

Cocaine Bear has no business being this good. And yet, here we are.