You will believe a bear can do lines.

The year’s best movie, Cocaine Bear (we are calling it early!) is in theaters now, and that’s exactly where you should see it. The Elizabeth Banks-directed horror comedy was made to be enjoyed en masse, because the crowd reactions enhance the experience of watching it.

Yes, this movie is nothing more than the title suggests, with approximately 0% subtlety, nuance or deep meaning. But this story of a coked-up brown bear on a killing spree is 100% fun. Based (very, very loosely) on a true story of a bear in a national park who discovers, then ingests a quantity of cocaine, Jimmy Warden’s script for Cocaine Bear built upon that slender frame until it became an all-out Man vs. Nature epic.

As funny as it is, though, Cocaine Bear is still a horror, and is rated R. If you are averse to gore, you should know that this is a film with more kills than Hereditary (and more bears than Midsommar. if that means anything to you), but on the plus side, it definitely has way more laughs per minute than both of Ari Aster’s boutique horror films combined.

The story begins in 1985 when a drug runner who looks to be high on his own supply (an uncredited Matthew Rhys, the first of three former stars of The Americans in the cast), tossing duffel bags that are stuffed with bricks of cocaine out of an airplane hatch. Before he can don his chute and jump after his ill-gotten goods, he conks himself on the head and falls to his death.

After that precipitating event, we meet the cast of characters. There’s a female black bear, courtesy of some decent but not perfect CGI, who is already loaded when the movie begins, having sampled a brick or two of coke that fell into the Chattahoochee National Forest, in northern Georgia.

Then we have Missouri drug dealer Syd White (Ray Liotta, in one of his final roles) sends his son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) and his friend David (O’Shea Jackson) into the woods to retrieve the stash. Also in the woods is Sari (Keri Russell), a nurse who is looking for her daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her pal Henry (a delightful Christian Convery), who picked the wrong day to skip school.

Over at the ranger station, Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) is trying to get her flirt on with Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) but has to contend with a group of teens who are terrorizing visitors to the park, including Stache (Aaron Holliday.) The cops are there too, including Detective Bob (Isaiah Whitlock) and officer Reba (Ayoola Smart). While not a comprehensive cast list, these are the main combatants against our hero, the bear.

And the bear truly is one of the heroes in the movie; if you don’t find yourself rooting for the cocaine-fueled apex predator, then the movie has not done its job properly. Fans of gruesome death scenes will have a hard time choosing their favorite in a movie that seems to be working really hard to outdo itself in every successive scene. You won’t want to get too attached to any of the cast, but Banks does a decent job of making you care about most of them.

The movie is co-produced by Chris Miller and Phil Lord, who were behind The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, so despite Cocaine Bear being a live-action film, it has less gravity than you’d expect, thanks to the deft comic touches found throughout the movie. A sober judgement of Cocaine Bear would pick apart flaws in the CGI, perhaps in the acting, and render unto it three, maybe three and a half stars. Go see it with a group though, and you’ll have a five-star good time.