95 min | R | February 24, 2023 | Universal Pictures
A black bear in a Georgia forest eats a duffel bag of cocaine and decides the woods belong to it. Elizabeth Banks turns one tabloid headline into a creature feature with a high body count. The title is the whole pitch, and the movie never pretends otherwise.
A black bear finds a duffel bag of cocaine in a Georgia forest in 1985. It eats the cocaine. It develops an appetite for more and for the humans who wander into its range. Elizabeth Banks builds a creature feature around a single tabloid headline and a title that doubles as a logline. The film knows that the premise is the entire product. It commits to a high body count with as much arterial spray as the rating allows.
Keri Russell plays Sari, a mother who hikes into the forest to find her daughter, with a grounded urgency the material does not require. Alden Ehrenreich plays Eddie, a grieving small-time dealer sent to recover the lost product, and gives the film its most human register. O’Shea Jackson Jr. plays his partner Daveed with deadpan exasperation that lands most of the comedy. Ray Liotta plays Syd, the drug boss who wants his cocaine back, and brings real menace to a part written as a punchline. Isiah Whitlock Jr. plays Bob, a detective tracking the operation, and Margo Martindale plays Ranger Liz with a broad crush on the wildlife inspector that the script overplays. Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays Peter, that inspector, who exists mostly to put a body in front of the bear.
Banks directs from a script by Jimmy Warden that strings together set pieces with thin connective tissue. The bear is a digital creation, and the effects team frames it to hide the seams in motion and expose them when it holds still. The gore is practical where it counts, and the kills favor comic timing over suspense. The editing cross-cuts between three converging storylines and loses momentum every time it leaves the forest. The cinematography leans on amber light and lens flares to evoke the period without fully selling it. The score reaches for eighties synth cues that telegraph the jokes before they arrive.
The film works best when it stops pretending to have characters and lets the bear do its job. The premise carries a string of inventive kills and a few genuine laughs. It cannot sustain the stretches between them, where the human plots ask for investment the movie has not earned. Banks understands the assignment and refuses to dignify it beyond what it needs. The result is a creature feature that delivers exactly the thing on the label and nothing underneath it.