It gives me no pleasure to hate on “Cocaine Bear.” The director Elizabeth Banks (”Pitch Perfect 2,” the “Charlie’s Angels” reboot) isn’t the chief problem, even if her mashup of dismemberment, mugging and dubious heartwarming is this month’s working definition of “tonal problems.” But with this script, the project was cooked long before the actors got to the set, ready to interact with a digital, coked-up bear to be created further down the production pipeline.
“Cocaine Bear” is a title, certainly, and Universal put together a promisingly berserk trailer. The story springs from actual life, as briefly lived by an actual bear who, in 1985, discovered 88 pounds of cocaine dropped from a smuggler’s small plane into the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in Georgia.
Two deaths resulted from that incident. The smuggler died after his parachute malfunctioned and he landed in someone’s driveway in Knoxville, Tennessee. The bear, meanwhile, apparently died after reading Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero” and giving that stuff a try.
