Cocaine Bear

So I have been so excited for Cocaine Bear since I first saw the trailer, when I found out it was based on something real I wanted to see it even more because the very idea of a black bear for realsies high on cocaine is hilarious. Lots of films we've seen lately have been intellectual and have made statements (or at least attempted to) and this movie was clearly just for entertainment and I was super ready to just shut my mind off for an hour and a half, so let's get to it…

First of all the cast was great, Ray Liotta, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Margo Martindale were all hilarious and the way that all the cast members played off of each other was great. But really the highlights of the cast were the kids for me. Brooklyn Prince and Christian Convery are incredibly talented kids and they were absolutely hysterical. Most of the scenes where the entire theater laughed included the kids. They were adorable and bold and it was great.

The actual story was exactly what I expected it to be, it was straightforward and fun and it didn’t try to have more plot than it needed. Is it a stupid movie? Of course it is, but if you want to shut your brain off for an hour and half and just laugh then this is the perfect movie. There was enough of a storyline that it made sense as to why everyone was in the woods and that's really all you need. For a movie like this it would be so easy to rely on cheap, easy, gross humor and it never did that. The comedy in this movie was more about timing and context than actual content and that’s what made it funny. The other thing that was inevitable in this movie was some gore, I mean a bear went on a murderous rampage. We were obviously going to see people get ripped apart, however it wasn’t excessive. So I really hate gross things, and that is a very wide blanket statement that applies to many things but I really don’t like seeing guts and stuff so I knew I was going to have some cringe moments going into this movie. That said I really only had one gross out moment, the bear is standing on top of a door that is on top of a guy and there are guts hanging off of the bear’s face and they started to drip off onto the guy…it was gross but some gore was necessary.

So overall this movie was nothing groundbreaking, nothing spectacular happened but it was a good movie. I think what most people need to realize is the first step to assessing the quality of a movie is, did it accomplish what it set out to? And the answer for this specific movie is yes, it did. Now some people just can’t accept that not all movies have to be profound and brilliant. Now if they try to be and fail that's one thing but some movies exist solely to entertain with no other meaning behind it and that's okay. Some people don’t want to think when they absorb media, and though I think that as a life plan that’s stupid but occasionally that's perfectly acceptable. So because it did exactly what it meant to, I give it a 9/10, I would watch it again, I would show it to people and it was entertaining. In fact it's the perfect play in the background at a party or gathering kind of movie.