Cocaine Bear

The high wears off pretty quickly in Cocaine Bear, a comedy about a drug-fueled apex predator on a carnivorous rampage that sounds more fun than it plays out.

This appropriately campy thriller from director Elizabeth Banks (Pitch Perfect 2) features a vicious four-legged title character who’s more compelling — and more worthy of our rooting interest — than its two-legged counterparts.

However, it also becomes repetitive as we wait for the deliriously vicious bruin, coked up and bloodthirsty, to sneak up repeatedly behind the hapless humans and tear them apart limb by limb.

Apparently inspired by true events, the story is set in 1985, when a mishap involving an airborne cocaine shipment results in bricks being scattered throughout national forest property in the Appalachian foothills.

That leads an out-of-state dealer (Ray Liotta) to send his slacker son (Alden Ehrenreich) and his enforcer (O’Shea Jackson) to retrieve the load before it’s discovered.

Several other eccentrics converge, too, although without knowledge of the drugs until it’s too late. A precocious young girl (Brooklynn Prince) and a classmate (Christian Convery) sneak away to play hooky, leading her mother (Keri Russell) to search for them. A cantankerous park ranger (Margo Martindale) and her assistant (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) chase a vandal (Aaron Holiday) and his gang. Then there’s a cop (Isiah Whitlock) trying to bust the narcotics ring.

Of course, they’re all beaten to the stash by a normally docile black bear who doesn’t discriminate when it comes to its amped-up appetite for human flesh.

The one-joke premise feels stretched to feature length. Sheer absurdity enables it to resist logical scrutiny, yet the screenplay also juggles too many characters and subplots to maximize the impact of its over-the-top gore.

The film starts to feel like a sinister game of hide-and-seek that uses its abundant forest foliage to its advantage. But it’s really more reliant on jump scares and reflex laughs than clever twists or subversive ingenuity.

There are some scattered big laughs along the way, and you can appreciate Banks and her ensemble cast refusing to take this mess too seriously, particularly veteran character actors like Whitlock and Martindale.

Genre aficionados might appreciate the attempt to update the legacy of cheesy creature features from yesteryear. But while it has style and attitude to spare, most of Cocaine Bear simply blows.

Rated R, 95 minutes.