10 Recent Movies That Wasted AMAZING Concepts
9. A Bear Goes On A Coke-Fuelled Rampage - Cocaine Bear
The moment that a film about a cocaine-huffing bear going on a drug-induced rampage in the American wilderness was announced - and one very loosely based on true events, no less - it was tough not to be intrigued.
The marketing for the shrewdly-titled Cocaine Bear promised an absolutely insane, R-rated romp where a hard-partying bear rips any human it comes across limb from limb, and really, that's all it needed to be.
And yet, there's a baffling tameness to Elizabeth Banks' film which rather undercuts its scuzzy, edgy potential.
Beyond focusing far too much on the uninteresting human characters - especially a pair of children we know aren't ever coming to real harm - the script seems almost unafraid to indulge in the grisly schlock most people allured by the title "Cocaine Bear" were surely looking for.
It feels like a studio exec heard the original pitch and then immediately planed the edges away, resulting in a sanitised, not-gnarly-enough end product that's bloated out with tedious human subplots and doesn't feature nearly enough bear-based carnage.
Cocaine Bear should've been an extremely nasty and mean-spirited horror-comedy about what happens when large animals accidentally ingest copious amounts of the nose powder.
Instead, it ended up feeling like a movie that couldn't stop pointing out how "crazzzzzzy" and meme-worthy it is.