There is a small subgenre of films without a trade or benefit that we could call “trailers for Twitter”: things so grotesque and absurd that they are very funny with their announcement and then they are forgotten forever. Luckily, since the tape has cost two duros, if a few end up stinging out of pure curiosity, they will already cover expenses. This is the case of ‘Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey’, ‘Titanic 666’ or ‘Big Shark’, which really don’t interest anyone but they know how to attract attention for two minutes in the stormy and fetid waters of the Internet. Luckily, ‘Vicious Bear’ is slightly different.
Scandalous
maybe some of you remember the wave of laughter and strange fanaticism before the premiere which was one of the first films of this genre, ‘Snakes on the plane’: the work starring Samuel L. Jackson took time to get to the heart of the matter and, as much as it promised fun without complexes, in the end it was much more boring than it should (Most of these movies are, the big part is in the trailer!). However, Elizabeth Banks has learned from those mistakes.
After hitting it in style with her version of ‘Charlie’s Angels’, the director and actress has decided to tell a low-medium budget story (around 30 million dollars) in which it goes straight from the first minute: from the first scene we have a cocaine-addicted bear in action, and for the next hour and a half we will see him do everything we have been promised. I mean, snort and kill. Indeed, there is only one joke in ‘Vicious Bear’, but it is a very funny joke.
Banks is not capable of going beyond the meme and the approach, and his histrionic characters are mere props. Yes, there are more or less funny scenes with them (the children eating cocaine, the fight in the bathrooms), but all the footage is a mere wait for the bear to come out again and, with it, the spread of deaths and laughter. Even so, it would be unfair to qualify it with the same rectitude with which we would judge more serious films or films with pretensions to greatness: this he is clear about what he is, what he is trying to do and how he is going to achieve it. Nobody has the right to be angry with a cinema that is, deep down, honest.
Dangerous
The ‘Vicious Bear’ joke is always the same: a bear becomes addicted to cocaine and every time he meets a human he eats it. For an hour or so, it works like clockwork. Every time the bear appears on screen, you know there’s going to be a little bit of blood, a little bit of laughter, and a little bit of white dust here and there: continuous variations on the same gag, as if it were the joke of the aristocrats. But in a bloody and drug addicted version.
But in the end, the humor fades, the film thinks it’s time to grow up and in its third act it focuses on closing some plots for which the viewer has never bet. The joke can no longer stand by itself, coarse salt stops being so tasty and the film falls to its knees under the weight of its own sins. ‘Vicious Bear’ becomes tasteless chewing gum that doesn’t know when it’s time to stop.
Posed more as a ‘Saturday night live’ sketch than as a movie, ‘Vicious Bear’ It is directed as if it were a final degree short in which narrative risks are hardly taken. In fact, in camera shots and photography, it is reminiscent of those eighties video store movies in the style of ‘My friend Mac’ or direct-for-television Disney productions, in an attempt to transgress them that I am not very clear that he is aware of.
Tedious
If you go to ‘Vicious Bear’ expecting art and essay, hilarious comedy or Jaws-style horror, you’re going to be disappointed. input, It already seems in itself the version of The Asylum from a better known film (Of course, the production company has already released their version, ‘Attack of the meth gator’), but it never becomes either funny enough to raise the meme or catastrophic enough to be laughed at. It’s just there. And that’s the worst thing that can happen to a movie about a drug-addled bear with a killing spree.
Much of the blame for the film remaining in a creative stasis lies with its main characters: not only are there too many of them (clearly), but also they lack charisma, motivation and not looking like a walking cartoon. It’s as if after signing the one-line synopsis, Jimmy Warden, the screenwriter, he would have written the rest of the film in an afternoon without bothering to review it. To put it another way: ‘Vicious Bear’ will be funnier (and probably make more sense) in the “highlights” cuts on YouTube than in the movie itself.
That ‘Vicious Bear’ ended up being an Oscar joke (which ended up harassing Malala Yousafzai herself!) can only be explained under the umbrella of the meme: We like the idea of the film so much that we want all of it to be like that. But, sadly, and beyond the scenes that we all hope to see, it is not able to live up to expectations, remaining in an elongated sketch of no great importance. iconic? Of course. Hooligan? More or less. Good? Definitely not.
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