“Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Find out more about how we test and score products.“
Judging by the crowd that turned out for the first local screening of Elizabeth Banks’ gory killer-bear comedy, Cocaine Bear might be the movie event of the year. Banks’ weird, wild movie is loosely inspired by the real story of an American black bear that ingested a massive amount of cocaine dumped in the wilderness by a drug smuggler in 1985. In the real world, the bear sadly died from an overdose, but Banks’ R-rated film imagines a timeline in which that bear went on a cocaine-fueled murder spree across the forests of Georgia, ripping tourists, rangers, and ambitious drug smugglers to bloody shreds.
It’s a premise that clearly resonates across a wide, generational spectrum, but is it any good? At its best, Cocaine Bear is a mixed bag. The film’s impressive cast mostly feels like they’re in on the joke, and it generally maintains a sweet spot between full-on camp and taking itself too seriously.
Banks assembles a great ensemble of actors in Cocaine Bear who know when to oversell the drama and when to play it straight.
Playing a henchman tasked with retrieving the cocaine, O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton) is positioned as a sort of audience surrogate, observing (and experiencing) the madness of it all through a (relatively) rational lens. Conversely, the reliably entertaining Margo Martindale (Justified) plays an impulsive, gun-toting forest ranger with an inferiority complex and an itchy trigger finger who’s primed to add more chaos to the saga.
The cast is filled out by Keri Russell (The Americans) as a mother in a neon-pink track suit searching for her missing daughter, who was kidnapped — and inexplicably, not torn apart — by the bear. The Florida Project actress Brooklynn Prince plays the daughter, while Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth) portrays the girl’s best friend, who seems all too aware that these events are going to turn him into a therapist’s most lucrative client.
Pushing some of the film’s other narrative threads forward is Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) as the grieving partner of Jackson’s character, Isiah Whitlock Jr. (The Wire) as the sad-sack police detective investigating the whereabouts of the missing cocaine, and Ray Liotta as a drug kingpin on the hook for the botched drug run — it’s one of the Goodfellas actor’s final roles.
More familiar faces pop in and out of the film, mostly to add some comic relief before their characters are savagely mauled, including Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Modern Family), Kristofer Hivju (Game of Thrones), and Matthew Rhys (The Americans), among others. Their screen time is brief, but effective, and Banks does a nice job of putting them in position to maximize laughs.
While the general vibe of the film wavers a bit as it toys with familiar genre tropes — the single mother who finds her inner strength while protecting her child, criminals who have a change of heart when faced with the impact of their actions, the animal-rights activist eaten by the creatures he protects — Cocaine Bear strikes a balance between being not as funny as you hope and not as dumb as you fear. It’s also a smartly compact, 95-minute escapade that knows it needs to get the job done well before your buzz starts wearing off.
Ultimately, Cocaine Bear delivers on its wild premise, as long as you enter the theater with the appropriate expectations.
Banks’ film is well-executed dumb fun, with an edginess that never goes too far, and a self-awareness that ensures you don’t think too hard about the escalating insanity of events unfolding on the screen. It feels intentionally bad, and everyone is in on the joke, including the expertly animated CG bear who becomes an ursine John Wick over the course of the film (t’s worth noting that the bear was created by the talented team at Weta FX, and is the real star of the film).
The film’s opening scene features a cocaine-addled pilot (Rhys) dumping duffel bags of blow out of a plane, only to knock himself unconscious and fall to his death, setting the story’s events in motion. It’s a scene that seemingly offers the best advice Cocaine Bear can offer audiences: If you want to have a good time, turn off your brain, because things just get dumber from here.
Directed by Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine Bear is in theaters now.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?