Review: The title says it all in 'Cocaine Bear,' but the movie could do a lot more with its crazy premise

Say this much for the horror-comedy “Cocaine Bear”: It’s all right there in the title. There’s a bear and a lot of cocaine — what more do you need?

Since I’m asking, I could have used some narrative coherence amid all the drug-fueled animal incoherence. For all the craziness of “Cocaine Bear,” there’s a rote predictability about it, as if director Elizabeth Banks (“Pitch Perfect 2,” “Charlie’s Angels”) and screenwriter Jimmy Warden didn’t given every indication they didn’t just think up the concept of a cocaine-snorting bear and went on autopilot the rest of the way.

Actually, there once was a bear who got into some cocaine, back in 1985 — which is enough to kick-start the “inspired by true events” tag at the movie’s beginning. When a drug mule flying over the South dumps duffel bags full of cocaine, and then conks himself in the head and dies without opening his parachute, there’s a race between cops and drug dealers to retrieve the kilo bricks.

What neither side knows is that a black bear got there first, which makes sense because the bags landed in a national forest in Georgia and the bear already lives there. The bear consumes a kilo or two, and gets a hankering for the white powder, and goes sniffing for more — and anyone getting in the way is going to be the bear’s next meal.

Among the humans who cross paths with the bear: 

• Two low-level drug dealers, Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), sent by their boss Syd (Ray Liotta, who finished work on the movie just before dying last May) to retrieve the kilos before Syd’s Colombian business partners get mad.

• Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a detective on the trail of the cocaine.

• A nurse, Sari (Keri Russell), who realizes her teen daughter Deedee (Brooklynn Prince) has skipped school with her friend Henry (Christian Convery) to go into the woods.

• The Forest Service ranger, Liz (Margo Martindale), who reluctantly escorts Sari up toward a waterfall, when Liz would rather be making time with a forest biologist, Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). 

• Various other actors who probably had to have various body parts molded by the special-effects crew, so their characters could be chomped into and scattered about convincingly.

Banks, as a director, has an ear for a good throwaway joke or comic performance, and she has the sense not to get in the way of Martindale or Liotta, to name two, when they’re giving more than the material contains. 

But “Cocaine Bear” reaches a point of diminishing returns, where everyone involved —onscreen, behind the camera and in the audience — realizes there’s not as much material here as was needed to fill 90-or-so minutes. Starting with a crazy premise gets you so far (e.g., “Snakes on a Plane”), but you have to have a plan for getting out of the woods.

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‘Cocaine Bear’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violence and gore, drug content and language throughout. Running time: 95 minutes.