I group these two titles together, not because they both have animals in their titles, but because these are both bad movies that are bad in very different ways. This is by no means a universally held opinion. One of these movies made a lot of money at the box office while the other won two Academy Awards.
"Cocaine Bear" is more understandably a bad movie, because it's trying to be a throwback to creature features of the '80s, which were always pretty dubious in construction. It has a killer premise, very, very loosely based on an incident where a black bear managed to consume massive amounts of lost cocaine from a smuggling operation gone wrong. The real bear died almost instantly, but the film decides that the bear should go on a drug-fueled rampage and encounter several unlucky human beings. A vastly overqualified cast has been assembled to play the victims, including a park ranger (Margo Martindale), a wildlife activist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a cop (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a couple of guys trying to recover the cocaine (Alden Ehrenreich, O'Shea Jackson Jr.), their boss (Ray Liotta), a hiker couple (Kristofer Hivju), some paramedics (Kahyun Kim, Scott Seis), a pair of kids (Brooklynn Prince, Christian Convery), and a stressed out mom (Keri Russell).
None of these characters are well fleshed out in any sense, because the point isn't to get to know them. It's to root for the bear to kill off most of them in the most funny and grisly ways possible. There are dismemberments, eviscerations, and a big sequence with an ambulance that is the clear high point of the movie. The bear, rendered with CGI good enough to not call much attention to itself, is attacking humans because it wants more cocaine. It is essentially the shark from "Jaws," popping up every few minutes to cause chaos for whomever it meets in its path. This is pretty entertaining the first few times we see it, but the novelty wears off quickly. "Cocaine Bear" is also trying to be a comedy, and most of the humor is of the shock and awe variety. The cast get a couple of good line readings in, and there are some genuinely eyebrow-raising scenes involving drug consumption, but otherwise the movie is pretty tame. Elizabeth Banks gamely shepherds along the hijinks, never letting the bad behavior get too out of hand. In the end, the movie is what it says on the poster. Bear on cocaine acts funny. Everyone screams. Not a lot else happens, but if easy thrills are what you're after, you could do a lot worse than "Cocaine Bear."
Now "The Whale" is a film of higher ambition, directed by Darren Aronofsky. Written by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his own play, the film is about a grossly obese man named Charlie (Brendan Fraser) who is desperately trying to reconnect to his teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) before he succumbs to his numerous health problems. Charlie's only friend is a nurse named Liz (Hong Chau), who is trying to keep him alive and makes regular visits. Otherwise, Charlie is isolated from human contact, teaching online writing courses with his camera off during Zoom calls, and hiding from the food delivery guy. There's a subplot with a young Christian missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins), who knocks on the door one day and takes an interest in Charlie's salvation.
Because it's Darren Aronofsky, the misery of Charlie's existence is put into uncomfortably sharp focus. Fraser and the makeup team went to great lengths to transform the actor into a grotesquely ill man at the end of his life. It is dangerously close to being exploitative, and occasionally veers into distasteful territory. Charlie's physical appearance is often a distraction from what "The Whale" is trying to do with the characters, which is to give a seemingly unredeemable man a chance to undo some of the damage he's caused, even when it seems to be too late. However, the metaphors about faith and art are entirely too blunt, and the dialogue too histrionic. Charlie is positioned almost like a Christ figure, a sweet tempered man who overeats out of unresolved grief, while the people that he's wronged - Ellie and her mother Mary (Samantha Morton) - are vicious and awful in every interaction they have with him. Aronofsky can't seem to help underlining the unpleasantness, making the visuals very bleak and claustrophobic.
And yet, there are good reasons to watch the film. Brendan Fraser's performance has rightly won accolades, and is the peak of his comeback to date. Hong Chau does memorable work with a very thin character. Everyone involved with the film is clearly trying their best to make something meaningful out of the mess, and there's a lot of ambition here that I don't see onscreen often enough. This is not a good film, but perhaps we can say it is a nobly misguided one. Maybe in the hands of a less astringent director, or with a more seasoned writer, I can see how a better, more worthwhile film could have come about. "The Whale" is bad, but a better kind of bad than we normally see at the movies.
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