★★★☆☆

“Cocaine Bear” delivers exactly what one might expect from a film with that title: a bear, cocaine and aimless buckets of gore.

A deliciously grisly (no pun intended) action-comedy featuring the titular drug-fueled creature’s man-eating rampage, “Cocaine Bear” leans into the absurdity of its premise and produces entertainingly campy thrills, though an often unnecessarily elaborate story threatens to tame the beast.

Directed by comedy queen Elizabeth Banks and loosely based on the bizarre true story of a bear that accidentally overdosed on cocaine in 1985, “Cocaine Bear” chronicles the bloody fallout of a drug trafficking operation gone wrong. When duffel bags filled with cocaine are deposited haphazardly into the forests of Georgia by an irresponsible trafficker, the drugs are discovered and consumed by a 500-pound black bear. 

The narcotics prompt the bear to cut a blood-drenched path of violence through the wilderness, attacking an assortment of gangsters, teenagers, park rangers, hikers and others who have converged in the area.

“Cocaine Bear” is raucously entertaining when it fully commits to a surreal tone that squeezes morbid comedy out of absurdly violent moments — the same quality perfected by Amazon Prime’s hit show “The Boys.”

In many scenes, the film achieves this gleefully unhinged tone. One particular sequence involving a park ranger with poor aim and a frantically swerving ambulance creates an unexpected level of tension without ever abandoning its commitment to silly, over-the-top gore. Any scene that involves the bear removing human limbs also helps to maintain an enjoyably cheesy atmosphere.

The film also uses the plausible unpredictability of a large, cocaine-crazed animal to skillfully subvert expectations. At one point, after consuming an entire pack of snow-colored powder, the bear drags itself along the forest floor on its back before engaging in a bizarre hugging dance with a confused and terrified man standing nearby. 

The film includes these hilariously strange segments to prioritize effective comedy over simply displaying scene after scene of mindless kills — and this (slight) nuance is what separates “Cocaine Bear” from the irredeemably brainless “Sharknado” franchise.

So how could this glorious masterwork possibly falter? The answer might surprise you: Banks’ film often takes itself too seriously.

A movie as absurd as “Cocaine Bear” can only succeed by displaying a healthy sense of self-awareness — that is, it should recognize its ridiculous nature and, when possible, poke fun at itself. 

Inexplicably, however, the writers of the film chose to construct an unnecessarily intricate plot for a premise that does not warrant a complex story. For a B-movie about a rampaging black bear high on cocaine, Banks’ film displays a curious number of interwoven plotlines and attempts at emotional moments. 

“Cocaine Bear,” simply put, did not require such depth. The writers should have settled for enjoyably ridiculous monster-movie violence instead of trying (and failing) to build a serious narrative. 

A dizzying array of characters, each supplied with a unique backstory and agenda, also needlessly muddles the film’s narrative. Though some, such as Christian Convery’s traumatized 13-year-old, are endearing and memorable, the sheer quantity of main characters distracts from the manic violence that should have been the film’s focus.

A smaller cast of similarly motivated characters — akin to Alexandre Aja’s “Crawl” or Jaume Collet-Serra’s “The Shallows” — simply trying to avoid the bear would have befit Banks’s ludicrous monster flick much better.

In the midst of its futile attempts to construct an elaborate plot and develop its enormous compendium of characters, the movie affords frustratingly little screentime to its most valuable asset: the bear. When it does appear, the drug-fueled beast — brought to life by surprisingly seamless CGI — barrels across the screen, spilling blood and tearing out intestines in an appropriately chaotic fashion. 

In a strange way, the bear’s indiscriminate path of destruction is almost enchanting to watch. By the film’s conclusion, the bear becomes a far more entertaining character than most of the humans featured in the film.

Whatever its faults, “Cocaine Bear” offers moviegoers a welcome reprieve from the lofty Oscar-bait films and bland, conveyor-belt-deposited superhero flicks that Hollywood usually churns out. Even when trying to generate a bizarrely intricate story, Banks’ film knows how to have fun and garner genuine laughs from its audience to an extent that few action-comedies are capable of.

Drugs dropped in the forest. A rampaging black bear thirsty for blood and blow. A group of hapless humans assembled in the woods. A cinematic masterpiece obviously destined for awards consideration. “Cocaine Bear.” Purchase your tickets now.