Elizabeth Banks’ “Cocaine Bear” tries so hard to conjure an attitude that it forgets to be a movie. There’s nothing here beyond the meme-friendly title, just as there was nothing underneath “Snakes on a Plane” or “Sharknado.” In all these cases, the filmmakers seem cowed by their titles. They know their movies have to be flippant and debauched, checked out in a way that for their audience is at least adjacent to fun. But these films do not have the conviction or imagination to achieve those qualities, which shouldn’t feel achieved to begin with. There are few things more painful to witness in the cinema than the act of desperate artists trying to calculate outrageousness.
There used to be an art to making throwaway pulp projects with a hint of self-consciousness and satire, but American cinema is too corporatized for stray impulses these days. Watching “Cocaine Bear” and wishing I was sitting in almost any other auditorium, I thought of the movies that John Sayles wrote in between more prestigious projects back in the 1970s and ‘80s, namely “Piranha,” “Alligator” and especially “The Howling.” Those movies know they are ridiculous and have fun with it, yet their sense of craft is taken seriously. “The Howling” is a legitimately great movie, and it was directed by Joe Dante, another specialist in having his satirical genre cake and eating it too. These movies have atmosphere, terrific performances, monsters with stature, and jokes that suggest their creators can read the impudent minds of their own audiences.
“Cocaine Bear” wants a medal for simply existing. It’s pleased with itself for not being a Marvel sequel or another piece of awards’ bait. But Banks, a good actress who previously directed a “Pitch Perfect” sequel and a “Charlie’s Angels” reboot that you’ve almost certainly forgotten existed, has no idea what kind of tone she’s going for here. When I say there’s nothing underneath the movie’s title, that’s not a pretentious critic’s way of calling a silly monster movie superficial. I mean quite literally that there’s no plot, even for a monster movie, very few jokes, no atmosphere, no sense of pace or purpose.
It’s the 1980s and a bundle of coke falls out of a plane and lands in a national park, where a bear gobbles it up. Per the film’s relentless publicity, this much actually happened. In the film, several stock characters are spread out across a handful of subplots that lead them toward the coked-up bear in question. Banks doesn’t have the ingenuity for one plot let alone several, so this structure is a mistake. Instead of allowing the stereotypes to bounce off each other, giving the actors an opportunity to develop rapport and for the film itself to gather momentum, it hopscotches back and forth, seemingly starting all over again every five minutes. Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden have one joke: that it’s funny when the bear snorts coke. They really haven’t thought the premise through any farther than that. The killings are gory but unsurprising, unvaried, and have no impact, since Banks can’t decide whether she’s directing a horror movie or a comedy. There’s one mildly amusing bit involving a chase with an ambulance, which has been revealed in the film’s trailers almost in its entirety.
“Cocaine Bear” frequently offers up actors who stand around, waiting for a movie to show up. Many of them are ludicrously overqualified for the assignment, including Margo Martindale, Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson, Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Ray Liotta in his final role before his death last year. Their squandered abilities only add insult to injury.
I’ve always found the similarly themed “Tremors” to be obnoxiously cutesy. Next to “Cocaine Bear,” it’s “Jaws.”
An old joke: Wanna make God laugh? Have a plan. For the last 15 years, there’s been another way to amuse our theoretical creator: Pan a Marvel movie. They are inevitable, invincible, and their fans cannot understand how anyone could possibly walk away from one of them still craving cinema. No one has explained to my satisfaction why so many people have become so addicted to these boring, repetitive movies, but I suspect that the pointlessness is the point.
People walk into a theater and submit themselves to a sensory assault tank. In this spa, no one lives or dies. No one loves, and money, sex, and jobs essentially don’t exist. No emotional response is courted or expected, no special effect is special, and there are no beginnings, no endings, and no experiences that can’t be laughed off with a hacky one-liner or undone or redone with a trip to another timeline, planet, dimension, or universe, which are all indistinguishable from one another anyway. Audiences awaken from their stupor of exposition and CGI confetti and say something to the effect of “hey, that’s Marvel” and discuss with other addicts the Easter eggs they noticed, which exist to gratify those who pay to see the same damn pseudo-experience three times a year.
If you spend, say, $75 dollars a year per person on these movies at the theaters, and watch each year’s collection of miniseries, you might know that the extra standing in the background of scene 161 of a current production, in between two aliens, is at the center of his or her own quest to save the world from yet another vengeful demigod. Marvel is so greedy, so demanding of its base’s total acquiescence, that it even forces its audience to sit through all twenty-fuggin’-minutes of each production’s end credits, enticing them with two more nuggets of cameos and in-jokes that mean nothing. For all Marvel knows, that extra 20 minutes is the difference between whether or not you buy another of their toys, on your phone, out of boredom, while awaiting the next stimulation pellet.
Every once in a while, Marvel accidentally releases something that bears a tangential resemblance to a movie. The first “Ant-Man” was one of those, and it earned a reputation among skeptics as one of “the good ones.” It was a small-scaled caper film, with effects that were inventive and playful. There was room for actors to give stylish performances. If your partner dragged you to this movie, the surprise might have been that you liked it better than he or she did, because he or she was attempting to pay for the usual pseudo-apocalyptic nihilism that’s packaged in the sheen of a cutesy sitcom.
A regular movie, defined as having a plot with conventional causes and effects and characters who suggest human beings, can’t exist for long in Marvel-land. And so the third “Ant-Man” cannot merely be charming and pleasurable. It must be outfitted with a laborious, nonsensical title, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” and tasked with introducing the mythos for the next round of “Avengers” advertisements. The “Quantum Realm,” seen in engaging fits and starts in the first two “Ant-Man” pictures, is the primary setting this time out, and it’s revealed rather disappointingly to be another wing of a “Star Wars” theme park. Alien worlds and dimensions don’t seem alien in Marvel movies; they are just pretenses for more CGI orgasms.
I can’t say that “Ant-Man 3”—I refuse to dignify that other title—bored me exactly. It has a kind of insanity that’s new for Marvel. Decadence has set into this empire. There’s little pretense of a plot here—which I appreciated—just long, loose tangles of nonsense coated in computer-generated angel dust. There are things that look like flying dildos. There are things that look like Pac-Man ghosts. There are broccoli people, one of which hits on Evangeline Lilly’s almost nonexistent The Wasp. There are storm troopers with bongs for heads. An alien gives Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and his gang a secretion that they drink to allow them to hear alien speech as English, a bizarrely sexualized version of a joke that landed much better in “Galaxy Quest” over 20 years ago. The skies are a mixture of cheap Van Gogh knockoffs and what a child might produce on an Etch-a-Sketch. Most ridiculously, Corey Stoll’s very serviceable villain from the first “Ant-Man” has been turned into a giant robot head that suggests a thumb outfitted with spindly legs and a metal condom. He eventually dies, and his death is laughed off, because nothing matters in Marvel-land. I’m sure the thing Stoll is playing, yes nerds I know it’s from the comic, will be back in a spin-off or will be revealed to be the sentient throw-pillow of an intergalactic Demon To Be Named Later.
Part of me respects the unadulterated shittiness of this movie—this thing is far more unhinged than “Cocaine Bear,” and it least owns its shittiness, rather than believing itself to be capable of saving the world a la “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” Peyton Reed, a talented director who’s found himself in a hostage situation here, seems ready to ask “Are You Not Entertained?” I expected Russell Crowe’s gladiator to show up here and utter those very words, until I remembered that he basically already did that last summer, in “Thor 4.” Almost everything here is shoddy and contemptuously free-associational. You can nearly see the lines separating the actors from the cartoons that were filled in later, and eye lines sometimes don’t match at all. That Corey Stoll giant head thing is hideous to look upon, suggesting the chintzy FX of the earliest and cheapest days of CGI.
There’s more than a bit of Joel Schumacher’s “Batman and Robin” going on here too. “Ant-Man 3” exudes a similar sense of the inmates having inherited the asylum, of indulgence as obscenity, of Nero fiddling, of cake being eaten in place of bread, particularly in terms of the glazed, gluttonous, weightless, WTF décor and plotting. The villain, in fact, played by Jonathan Majors and called Kang, sometimes resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze. Kang can experience all of time simultaneously—cool idea! How? I didn’t see whichever thing offers that explanation, so the film’s incoherence is obviously my fault. In Marvel-land, an existential question of mortality and time’s linearity expresses itself as: Kang can shoot lasers out of his hands! Is that better than the lasers all the other things can shoot out of either their guns or their bodies? Yes, presumably, because Kang has conquered the Quantum Realm. How? Why? Oh, you silly, bless your heart…
