Cocaine Bear: A flaky farce with bite

The title tells all in Cocaine Bear, a furry, grisly, and (very) loosely factbased farce. It’s a live-action cartoon on a studio budget with B-movie aspirations, and producer/ director Elizabeth Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden duly achieve them.

Set in the ‘80s, aptly at the height of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign against drugs, the story — such as it is — concerns an illicit and ill-fated cocaine drop gone awry. The smuggler (briefly played by Matthew Rhys) comes to a bad end and the drugs end up scattered throughout the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia. The specific region is known as Blood Mountain, and it’s about to get a lot bloodier.

A black bear has ingested the cocaine and develops what might be described as an instantaneous addiction, going on a drug-fueled rampage. That the film is played very broadly for laughs was a wise decision. Had the film been played straight, it would have been, well, unbearable. Cocaine Bear is cinematic junk food, but funny and tasty junk food. Banks and Warden send up horror clichés by the score, and very often they succeed.

By and large, the human characters who encounter the crazed bear display varying degrees of stupidity. They open doors when they shouldn’t. They dither and talk when they should run. And in some cases, they get exactly what they deserve.

An appealing ensemble cast includes Keri Russell (Rhys’s o -screen partner) as a single mother searching for daughter Brooklynn Prince and classmate Christian Convery, who picked the wrong day to skip school; O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Alden Eisenreich as low-level criminals ordered to retrieve the cocaine; Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a dim-witted naturalist; Isiah Whitlock Jr. as a nosy detective; and Margo Martindale as trigger-happy Ranger Liz, who contributes to the body count due to her lousy aim.

Cocaine Bear holds the distinction of being Ray Liotta’s last film. Although