Movie Review Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear (2023) 

Directed by Elizabeth Banks 

Written by Jimmy Warden

Starring Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Brooklynn Prince, Ray Liotta, O'Shea Jackson, Alden Ehrenreich 

Release Date February 24th, 2023 

Published February 23rd, 2023 

Cocaine Bear makes a very big promise with its bizarre premise and I am happy to say that it mostly lives up to that promise. As directed by the very funny Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine Bear delivers a Black Bear that is, indeed, very high on Cocaine. Being high on cocaine, the Bear becomes highly aggressive, angry, and agitated. Thus, a bear that would normally prefer not to interact with humans becomes a violent, murderous beast, especially if you happen to have some more cocaine on you, this bear loves cocaine. 

The story of Cocaine Bear kicks off with a very funny scene. A man who is clearly high on cocaine is dancing around an airplane and tossing bags filled with cocaine off the plane and into a mountainous area of Georgia. The man plans on letting the plane crash to divert attention from the massive amounts of cocaine being dropped from it, but before he can leap out of the plane to accompany his cargo, the man manages to knock himself unconscious and fall out of the plane to his death. 

This death helps set to the tone for a violent, disturbing and quite funny dark comedy. Once we've established that there is cocaine in the forest and a bear has ingested a lot of it, we watch as disparate groups of people head into the forest, mostly unaware that cocaine has turned a mostly docile bear into a ravenous, cocaine addicted monster. Among our main cast are a pair of children played by Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery, they're skipping school for an adventure. Hot on their trail is the girl's mother, played by Keri Russell. She's accompanied by Forest Cop played by Margo Martindale and her crush, an animal care advocate played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson. 

Then, there are the drug dealers, out to retrieve their drugs. O'Shea Jackson and Alden Erhenreich are flunkies for a drug dealer, played by Ray Liotta. They are to retrieve the drugs by any means necessary or possibly face the wrath of Columbian drug kingpins. They will be joined unwillingly by a police detective, played by Isaiah Whitlock. The detective has been looking for a way to bust Liotta's drug dealer and he sees getting these bags of cocaine as a chance to put Liotta behind bars. Naturally, they will all come face to face with a bear that is off its face on cocaine and each will be lucky if they manage to get out of the forest intact. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: Untraceable

Untraceable (2008)

Directed by Gregory Hoblit

Written by Allison Burnett

Starring Diane Lane, Colin Hanks, Billy Burke, Jesse Tyler Ferguson

Release Date January 25th, 2008

Published January 25th, 2008

In Altman's brilliant The Player you hear his many Hollywood players describe possible projects thusly "It's Terminator crossed with Lassie" or "It's Roots crossed with Rambo" or other such horrors. This is based on real Hollywood parlance and patois. Producers and studio execs actually like using this sort of shorthand as a way of describing a project without having to read a whole script or listen to some creative type prattle on about motivations and subtext and the like. This practice is exactly how we end up with movies like Untraceable. No doubt, in some producers office some exec said something like "It's Hostel crossed with Network and Seven".

Untraceable indeed carries elements of each, not much on the Network portion; though the allusion is there. And, while I know some of you are reading this thinking that combo sounds really interesting you are missing the point. That is all Untraceable is. Some idea of a movie that producers can describe but fail to create. Ideas lifted from other movies and grafted onto the Frankenstein's monster that is Untraceable.

Diane Lane stars as FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh, the bureau's top expert in cyber crimes. With her partner Griffin (Colin Hanks), Jennifer tracks down perverts and identity thieves with a few quick key strokes and a call to the local cops to pick up the bad guy. Her latest case however is something entirely different. At first KillWithMe.com seems like some twisted prank. A kid captures a kitten and allows visitors to the site to dictate the cats fate. The site warns, the more visitors to the site the quicker the cat will die. After several thousand visitors the cat does indeed meet an ugly fate.

Soon the web murderer escalates to humans and Jennifer herself is on the killers list of potential victims.

It's nice to comfort ourselves with the idea that we would never go to a website where our page views are the instrument of murder. But, ask yourself this, have you been to one of those websites where you can bet on when Britney Spears is going to die? That website is out there and it takes a little bit of our collective humanity every time one of our fellow citizens casts another morbid ballot. I can't necessarily say that a website run by serial killer is the same as the macabre sickos who wait for a celebrities death with such fascination. Ask yourself though, if you could watch a celebrity die on a website, would you watch?

Our culture is becoming a pretty sick place and in that sense Untraceable seems to be pretty on point. Unfortunately, the movie cannot live up to the ideas behind it. The film unfolds in typically thriller-ish fashion. The killer, what luck, happens to live in the same town as our heroic FBI team. He kills, he taunts the authorities, he kills again and all that changes is the method of death and the quickness of the mass murder. To separate it only slightly from other mainstream thrillers, director Gregory Hoblit lingers on the torturous murder scenes as if he were paying tribute to Eli Roth and his Hostel movies. Hoblit doesn't seem to get off on the torture the way Roth does but the homage is there.

Hoblit wants to ape the popularity of torture porn without committing to it completely. In some ways that is even scummier than what Roth does. There is much that is scummy about Untraceable. What keeps the film from becoming truly disgusting is star Diane Lane who gives an air of class to the proceedings. Hoblit can't compromise his stars innate strengths and Lane elevates her every scene even as she is saddled with the nerdy void of Colin Hanks and lumpy love interest Billy Burke as the aptly named detective Eric Box, he's as charismatic as cardboard, Box is a perfect name.

Without Diane Lane we are looking at a movie quite similar to Freedomland, one of the all time bad mainstream thrillers. A more apt comparison may be to anything Ashley Judd made where she stars as either victim or cop. Credit Diane Lane, most stars are victims of movies such as Untraceable. She manages to elevate the movie with her star presence. That says something for her talent as Untraceable would have left most other actresses unemployable.