M3GAN, Cocaine Bear, and the Extremely Online: The Making of a Movie about the Horrors of Artificial Intelligence

The film that is coming to theaters today is Cocaine Bear, a movie that sounds like it was dreamed up between bong hits. The movie is similar to eight Legged FREAKS, snakes on a plane, and sharknado in the fact that it is about animals behaving badly. Based on the title and the tagline—“Apex predator, high on cocaine, out of its mind”—you know what you’re getting when you buy a ticket. Someone would want to see a bear on a rampage. It is an easy sell.

Coming a few weeks before Cocaine Bear’s February 24 release is M3GAN. This column has already delved into the diabolical doll dance moves that the film’s trailer inspired, and there’s no need to retread that angle here. But watching M3GAN’s titular droid bend and snap her way through countless mashups, it was hard not to see the irony of a movie about the horrors of artificial intelligence being promoted with a marketing campaign engineered for peak virality, as if the same algorithms were responsible for both its script and PR blitz.

Speaking of discourse, the Sundance Film Festival announced its lineup for 2023 this week. Cat Person was one of the most eye-catching entries. If it does follow the narrative of the New Yorker short story in the film, it will be interesting to see if that leads to the same level of attention and discussion.

Originally published in 2017, “Cat Person” landed amidst a flurry of conversations around #MeToo and, as a story about a college sophomore’s complicated relationship with an older man, found itself at the center of the zeitgeist. It was credited with sending the internet into a “meltdown,” and its virality is mentioned in nearly every reference to it. A retelling may have different impacts five years later, but it may be poised to ride a similar wave. (Side note: The author of “Cat Person,” Kristen Roupenian, wrote the story on which Bodies Bodies Bodies—another film for the extremely online—was based.)

Cocaine Bear: The Movie That Makes All The Movies Happen In The Nearby Forest – A Theoretical Aspect of “Lake Placid”

Although “Snakes” comes to mind among killer-animal comedies, the more germane comparison might be “Lake Placid,” which found laughs and scares in the rampage of a giant alligator. “Bear” doesn’t achieve that level of wit, but it does ratchet up the gore factor with limbs occasionally flying in all directions, those body parts looking a whole lot more realistic than the bear itself.

Indeed, the movie is a lot like the true events that inspired it and the shipment of cocaine lost in the Georgia woods in the 1980’s, as well as an often-cartoonish-looking ursa does to something you might see in a David. At times, it feels like all that’s missing is a hat and fondness for picnic baskets instead of cocaine.

As we’ve witnessed in other movies that employ movie magic to replicate present-day animals (as opposed to, say, monsters or dinosaurs), the bear might be unstoppable, but shoddy CGI renderings can halt a movie in its tracks. The best part about this “Bear” is that you don’t have to see it, because it’s in the vicinity.

Written (that is, creatively embellished) by Jimmy Warden, the film derives a degree of its humor from sheer goofiness, introducing a bunch of actors in smallish roles that make everyone potentially expendable.

There are three people dispatched to locate the missing coke in this film, all of them, including Ray Liotta, as employees of the drug dealer.

The problem with that template is nobody really registers until they become potential bear food. With the only way to distract the addicted bear from his cocaine addiction is by freeing himself from his slavering jaws, this bear has so many abilities and appetites that it could be considered an apex predator.

Cocaine Bear is not worth taking the time to watch in an intoxicated way. The film just doesn’t land right, and you can’t help but feel that it was manufactured just to be chopped up for a viral YouTube trailer.

The genre does reflect an expansion of Banks’ directing resume, and the film only runs 95 minutes, so the filmmakers were wise enough not to overextend a already-thin premise.

The movie, which is being released by Universal, has already spawned plans for a sequel. A lot of success will likely result in a Cocaine Bear Cinematic Universe, since wandering around in the woods being menaced by an unconvincing bear doesn’t cost much.

Blood Mountain: The Rise and Fall of a Wimpy Arsenic-Drug-Anarch-Solvy Detective

If so, give the kudos more to the concept than the movie, which mostly demonstrates, with apologies to an old marketing slogan, that things don’t always go better with coke.

The stage is set, then, for a cast of wacky characters to descend on Blood Mountain to retrieve the gear. You have Syd White, arch-drug dealer (played by the late Ray Liotta); his wimpy son with a penchant for plain penne pasta (played by Solo’s Alden Ehrenreich); and Syd’s deputy, Daveed, played by O’Shea Jackson Jr. There is also a police detective, played by The Wire’s Isiah Whitlock Jr., who is hot on their trail and worried about his coiffured “fancy dog,” Rosette. Also tempting death by drug-bear are a pair of kids and a concerned mother who are in pursuit, a park ranger who is an avid hunter, and a gang of colorfully dressed hoodlums who patrol the woods. Some are vicious and some aren’t. The film is over.