Chances are if the premise of a film is its best joke, then it is not going to be a particularly great film. Take Cocaine Bear, a 2023 action comedy directed by Elizabeth Banks. From a distance it would seem to have a killer concept: a plane overloaded with packaged cocaine dumps its cargo above an American national park, a black bear finds and accidentally ingests the drugs, and a violent rampage ensues. It is very loosely based on a true story, in that a plane did once dump a shipment of cocaine into the forest and a black bear did find and consume some of it. Of course in reality the bear attacked no one: it just ate 34 kilograms of coke and died.

Cocaine Bear is at its best in its opening minutes. A pair of hikers encounter a bear in the middle of a forest. They try to take photographs of it. It mauls one of them to death before playfully chasing a butterfly. It roughly two minutes the entire premise and purpose of the film is perfectly expressed, and it’s best joke – a bear is high on drugs – has been told. The remaining 90 minutes are a waste of everybody’s time. At least the cast and crew were paid.

A series of separate narratives are intertwined by the bear’s ongoing murder spree. Two children (played by Brooklynn Prince and Christian Convery) go looking for a waterfall, with one of their mothers (Keri Russell) hot in pursuit. The crime boss (the late Ray Liotta) responsible for the dumped cocaine dispatches some men (O’Shea Jackson Jr and Alden Ehrenreich) to find it. An assortment of park rangers, paramedics and petty thugs fill out the numbers, but they are essentially there as fodder for the bear.

There are significant problems with tone, as the film veers from black comedy to straight-faced melodrama and back. Violent gags come thick and fast, working and failing in a scattershot fashion. The entire enterprise ultimately feels stretched, and despite some merits winds up more frustrating than amusing.

Too much money has been spent on the film. In brief moments where the bear is visibly played by a man in a bear suit, the jokes tend to land better. For the majority of the film, where the bear is delivered via computer-generated imagery, it is simply nowhere near as funny. If Cocaine Bear had been made physically on a small budget, performed more coarsely and broadly, and packed with comically excessive flying limbs and gore, it could have at least found an appreciative cult audience. As it stands this is one of the worst kinds of movies: a slick, corporate attempt to manufacture cult appeal. That never works.