Cocaine Bear promises bats**t crazy antics and delivers exactly that

Sometimes a movie knows it’s dumb and fun and fully leans into all that deranged goodness.

If you go down to the woods today... Picture: Universal

The best dumb and fun movies are the ones that know they’re dumb and fun.

They’re not trying to elevate a simple premise with some highfalutin concept, nor are they trying to completely debase themselves either.

Cocaine Bear knows it’s dumb and fun, and it happily, almost smugly, leans into the full range of bats**t craziness.

This is a movie that makes no apologies for trying to make you howl in laughter and disgust – at the same time.

If you’re the sensitive type, if your stomach lurches at the sight of dismemberment or disembowelment, or if you *tsk tsk* at anyone else in the cinema making a peep, let alone delighting in full-throated cackles, you may want to trade in Cocaine Bear for Paddington.

This movie is madcap, often unhinged and most definitely wildly entertaining. It’s also, mercilessly, 95 minutes, the perfect length for this kind of eye-popping caper. Just long enough to sustain the pace.

It’s a plane! Picture: Universal

Hard to believe but Cocaine Bear is loosely based on the real story of a black bear found in 1985 in the woods in Tennessee, overdosed on at least a brick of cocaine worth $US2 million. Found near him were containers of cocaine dumped from a plane by a smuggler who was going down.

While there’s no record of the real-life bear – later nicknamed Pablo Escobear – rampaging through the forest and gorging on human victims, the story was prey for an absolute romp of a movie.

Of course, the details have been extravagantly exaggerated. The original 79kg bear is now a 230kg bear, and the body count has gone from zero to quite a bit more. Victims squeal, blood splatters and limbs fly.

But the nominally horror aspects are more than offset by the uproariously comedic.

Joining director Elizabeth Banks is a ragtag ensemble of Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Margo Martindale, O’Shea Jackson, Isaiah Whitlock Jr, Kristofer Hivju, Brooklynn Prince and the late Ray Liotta.

These guys clearly signed on to have a bit of fun – and who could blame them. Acting the fool is so much fun.

Cocaine Bear is in cinemas now. Picture: Universal

The plot is roughly as you’d expect – a black bear does a crap-tonne of cocaine and loses it mind in its quest for more and more and more coke. A junkie bear is definitely smarter than your average bear.

Anyone who comes across the bear is in for a bumpy time, including three wayward youths, a smitten park range, a mum looking for a her teenage daughter and her friend, a cop pursuing a drug baron, said drug baron and two minions, an animal conservationist, two lovey-dovey hikers and a couple of ambos.

There are plenty of plot contrivances to put the humans in the path of the bear but the lazy plotting doesn’t really matter because the movie promised one thing – an unhinged bear on cocaine, and delivers exactly that.

If Cocaine Bear falls short, it’s that it could’ve dialled up the wacky shenanigans up by about 30 per cent.

Rating: 3/5

Cocaine Bear is in cinemas now