Cocaine Bear’s NZ film connection makes for killer drug thriller

What do you get when you mix a large quantity of an illicit substance with a wild animal? One hell of a ride.

Keri Russell in a scene from Cocaine Bear.

Cocaine Bear (MA15+)

In cinemas

Three and a half stars

By and large, bears have had a cushy run on the screen, with lovable rascals such as Yogi, Winnie and Paddington outnumbering alpha predators like Teddy, the 3.4m kodiak bear who stars in the 1976 horror movie Grizzly.

There’s a bad-bear shift in The Revenant (2015) when a grizzly mauls Leonardo DiCaprio and leaves him for dead. To be fair she is only protecting her cubs.

The ursine star of Cocaine Bear takes a large paw step further. She would rip apart Leo and then sniff coke off his severed leg. She does have cubs but perhaps missed the warnings about intergenerational substance abuse.

This 95-minute film is loosely based on a true story. In 1985, an American drug smuggler ditched a load of cocaine from an overloaded plane. Some of it was found and ingested by a black bear.

The real story would be a shortish film. The stuffed carcass of Pablo Escobear can be seen at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, Kentucky, if you ever happen to be in that neighbourhood.

Actor turned director Elizabeth Banks (Charlie’s Angels) has taken this gram of truth and, with scriptwriter Jimmy Warden, turned it into something darkly hilarious.

The set-up reflects what happened in the mile-high 80s. An airborne drug smuggler (Matthew Rhys from The Americans) jettisons red duffel bags of cocaine. They land in Georgia. A bear, much bigger than the real one, finds a bag.

The rest of the film is more or less made-up. Drug gangster Syd (Ray Liotta in one of his final roles) dispatches his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and a henchman Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jnr) to recoup the coke.

Also in the national forest is nurse Sari (Keri Russell, also from The Americans). She’s searching for her 13-year-old daughter Dee Dee (Brooklyn Prince) who has skipped school along with classmate Henry (Christian Convery). The two kids also find some cocaine.

Others soon join in, including a police detective (Isiah Whitlock Jnr). This 95-minute movie is full of amusing character parts, including the remarkable Margo Martindale as a forest ranger who has the hots for a wildlife protection officer (Jesse Tyler).

“You got a dusty beaver there, ranger,’’ he tells her, straight-faced, patting a taxidermied beaver in her office. “Yeah, well,’’ she replies, straight-faced, “I am working on that.”

The standout star though is the computer-generated high-as-a-kite bear and we have New Zealand to thank for that. A chunk of this film’s $US40m ($59m) budget went to Wellington-based Weta-FX, the Oscar-winning visual effects outfit co-founded by Peter Jackson.

It’s worth the investment. The CGI includes motion capture performance by Kiwi actor and stuntman Allan Henry. The bear looks real — though I admit I’ve not been up close and personal with one that’s off its face on cocaine – and the bear-human scenes look near to real, particularly the moment the men discover the drug fiend is female.

This is a gory movie but it made me laugh out loud more than I have in a while at the cinema. Of course one’s sense of humour comes down to personal taste.

In my favourite scene, the bear chases an ambulance with the mauled forest ranger inside. It looks like something out of Mission Bearpossible.

This is soon after the bruin snorts the aforementioned coke line from a severed leg and is momentarily transfixed by a butterfly. The song chosen as the she gains on the ambulance (the music director is former Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh) is Depeche Mode’s 1981 hit I Just Can’t Get Enough.

This is certainly a different film. As edgy as it is, it could have been edgier, and the plot sags a little towards the end. But with the latest Ant-Man topping the box office, it wins points just for being different.

Nathalie Emmanuel, Kevin Hart and John Travolta in Die Hart

Die Hart (M)

Amazon Prime

Three stars

The comedy-thriller Die Hart opens with diminutive American comic actor Kevin Hart appearing on a morning television talk show. He complains that he’s sick of being Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s goofy offsider and wants to fulfil his lifelong dream of being an action hero.

The talk show hosts laugh, but Hart is not joking. He says his dream is ignored because he is only 5 feet 7 inches (170cm) tall. He adds that “if you took six inches off Idris Elba” his action roles would evaporate.

The talk show hosts mention that Tom Cruise is 5 feet 7 inches, and Hart loses the plot. Watching the show, however, is legendary action movie director Claude Van De Velde (French actor Jean Reno, who has had his fair share of he-man roles), and he is impressed.

He decides to cast Hart as the lead in his next movie. There is one condition: Hart must graduate from the renowned Action Star School run by Ron Wilcox (a terrific John Travolta). Alumni run from Chuck Norris to Cruise.

When Hart arrives at the school he sees Wilcox involved in what looks like a drug deal gone bad. Shots are fired. A Colombian drug dealer dies, or so it seems.

Soon after another actor, Jordan King (Nathalie Emmanuel), turns up. She looks like a Bond girl but she’s there because she has been cast in Kathryn Bigelow’s new action film, or so she says.

Wilcox tests them on the action star basics such as saving someone from a burning building, jumping from rooftop to rooftop and so on. The results are not what one sees in Die Hard movies.

This set-up puts the so-called fourth wall between actors and audience on shaky ground. Indeed, even the lead actor – the fictional Kevin Hart played by the real Kevin Hart (who is 5 feet 2 inches) – does not know where it is.

Was there a messed-up drug deal and are the Colombians now out for revenge? Or was that scene part of the action school curriculum? Or is it all invented as part of Van De Velde’s passion for cinema verite? Or is it bits of each, or is it something else altogether?

In this sense the recent film that comes to mind is The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, starring Nicolas Cage as Nic Cage. Like that movie, Die Hart pokes fun at the craziness of making movies, from the demands of the pampered talent to the computer-generated technology.

“Any idiot can jump on a green screen and pretend to be eaten by a CG dragon,” Wilcox tells his stars. He then orders them to do a love scene on the green screen.

There are running jokes about Hollywood action stars, particularly Matt Damon, “a no-name actor from New England” until he joined the school. One of them, Josh Hartnett, pops up as himself.

The leads are good, especially Travolta. I was reminded of his recent brilliant performance as Moose, an autistic man who stalks a film star in The Fanatic (2019).

Die Hart is a feature film based on the 2020 TV series of the same name. Most of the people involved returned, including the cast and director Eric Appel and screenwriters Derek Kolstad and Tripper Clancy.

Kolstad is creator of the John Wick film franchise, the fourth instalment of which arrives in cinemas on March 23, so he knows the action movie business.

This movie, most of which unfolds in the Action Star School, has lots of laugh-out-loud moments. At 120 minutes it runs out of ideas towards the end, but overall it remains an amusing entertainment.

Afterwards I went online to watch Hart and Johnson, who have made five films together, goading each other in radio and TV interviews. In that arena, Hart is more than a match for The Rock.