Producers: Kevin Downes, Jon Erwin, Andrew Erwin, Daryl Lefever, Joshua Walsh and Jerilyn Equibel   Directors: Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle   Screenplay: John Gunn and Jon Erwin   Cast: Joel Courtney, Jonathan Roumie, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Anna Grace Barlow, Kelsey Grammer, Nic Bishop, Jackson Robert Scott, Nicholas Cirillo, Ally Ioannides, Julia Campbell, Mina Sundwall, DeVon Franklin, Charlie Morgan Patton and Jolie Jenkins   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

Here’s a faith-based film whose basic appeal is to the charismatic evangelical group whose origin it celebrates—the Calvary Chapel Association, which numbers nearly two thousand independent churches globally.  Based on a 2018 book by Greg Laurie, who joined the denomination early on and became pastor at one of Calvary Chapel’s first expansion churches, it’s what can be called an authorized cinematic history, with rough edges smoothed off and a benign face put on everything.  But it does paint a portrait, however sanitized, of an intriguing movement of twentieth-century Christian revivalism in the United States. 

The movie’s title comes from a gushing 1971 cover story in Time Magazine, but the start of the so-called Jesus movement dates from a few years earlier, when Lonnie Frisbee, who’d joined the hippies of San Francisco in his late teens, began talking about the Bible among the flower children.  Preaching the gospel became a preoccupation, and he soon had attracted a following.  In 1968 he was introduced to Chuck Smith, the pastor of a small traditional church at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, who invited him and his followers to become part of the still-fledgling congregation, which grew astronomically under Smith and Frisbee and gained notoriety in the process.  Greg Laurie, a teen searching for direction in his life, joined the group in 1970 under Frisbee’s supportive guidance.

The treatment by John Gunn and co-director Jon Erwin passes over Frisbee’s early career, starting in 1968 with Smith, portrayed by Kelsey Grammer as a preacher initially hostile to the hippie lifestyle but easily convinced by the easygoing sincerity of Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie) to invite hippies into his church despite the opposition of some of its less open-minded members.  Separately we’re introduced to Laurie (Joel Courtney), a kid from a broken home whose mother Charlene (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) is an alcoholic, being introduced to the movement by pretty Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow), and gradually becoming fully committed to it.  Nodding to its source, the movie also includes some flashbacks to his unhappy childhood, in which he’s played by Jackson Robert Scott.

From this point the movie becomes a simple success story, with the movement growing astronomically and becoming a national media phenomenon through the appearance of the Time story (the author of which is played by Devon Franklin) and spawning an explosion of upbeat Christian music.  Laurie, adept with a camera, documents the rise, eventually assuming a role among the denomination’s unofficial leadership team.

The one discordant element is the departure of Frisbee, presented here as the result of his increasingly grandiose view of himself as a faith-healer and prophet.  In reality his lifestyle was complicated, and his separation from the denomination not nearly as simple a matter as depicted here; interested viewers might want to check out David Di Sabatino’s 2007 documentary “Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher,” which also goes into his life after the breakup.  “Jesus Revolution” ignores his post-1971 troubles, content merely to note in a closing caption that he and Smith reconciled prior to Frisbee’s death in 1993.

Unfortunately for the movie, Roumie’s absence from the last third or so leaves a gaping dramatic hole that Grammer and Courtney don’t fill manage to fill; he’s quietly charismatic, and not just in a religious sense, while they’re just dully earnest.  So ultimately we’re left with a vision of what seems a bland, feel- good version of Christianity, with doctrinal nuances pretty much overlooked in favor of a simple message that accepting Jesus as savior through baptism will bring joy and peace.  (In reality the denomination officially espouses a Calvinist theology, though hardly of an extreme sort.)  On a more positive note, production designer Aimee Holmberg and costumer Anna Redmon are fairly successful in creating a 1960s ambience, and cinematographer Akis Konstantakopoulos does a pretty good job of convincing us that the Alabama locations are actually in Southern California.  John Puckett’s editing can feel somewhat lethargic, but the score by co-director Brent McCorkle captures the era decently, especially as augmented by snatches of pop tunes.

Congregants of churches in the Calvary Chapel Association will no doubt appreciate seeing their founding fathers portrayed so positively on screen.  Those who are not members of the choir may enjoy being introduced to what is now a distant religious movement, even if the approach is relentlessly upbeat, inspirational and simplistic.

Producers: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Elizabeth Banks, Max Handelman, Brian Duffield and Aditya Sood   Director: Elizabeth Banks   Screenplay: Jimmy Warden   Cast: Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Christian Convery, Alden Ehrenreich, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Brooklynn Prince, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Kristofer Hivju, Hannah Hoekstra, Aaron Holliday, J.B. Moore, Leo Hanna, Ayoola Smart, Kahyun Kim, Scott Seiss, Matthew Rhys, Margo Martindale and Ray Liotta   Distributor: Universal

Grade: C

A throwback to the goofy horror comedies of the 1980s and 1990s—movies like “Tremors” and “Arachnophobia”—but with the added nastiness today’s audiences expect, “Cocaine Bear” has already achieved popular notoriety on the basis of internet chatter.  It doesn’t really live up to the hype: though sporadically amusing, it’s too busy and tries too hard.

This first solo feature screenplay by Jimmy Warden (who previously got a joint credit on “The Babysitter: Killer Queen,” the 2020 sequel to a movie in which he had an acting credit as “Some Asshole”) features an ensemble of characters, most of whom are assholes too.  In fact, a major problem with the picture is that there are entirely too many goofballs roaming around through the wilderness where the plot is set; rapidly shifting among them doesn’t permit any to get the focus that would engender much audience concern when they become the prey of the titular beast, a CGI critter that’s ostentatiously phony—one hopes as an intentional joke.

The story takes off from an actual 1985 event, when a drug runner tossed containers of coke from a plane, which were found by a bear that ingested the drug and died.  On its own that scenario would hardly make for an exciting movie, so Warden has essentially turned it into something similar to “Jaws” and its many imitators (including the recent “Beast,” also from Universal), but played for gruesome laughs, with plenty of gross-out comic violence and severed plastic limbs. 

“Cocaine Bear” starts with a reenactment of the drug dump and clips of news footage of the 1985 incident.  But it then takes us to a state park, where the cocaine landed and the bear ate some of it, supposedly driving it into a frenzy.  It attacks a couple of wedding-planning hikers, killing the woman (Hannah Hoekstra) and injuring her fiancé (Kristofer Hivju). 

Then a small army of other characters are introduced.  The ones viewers are primed to root for are Sari (Kerri Russell), her thirteen-year old daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and Dee Dee’s chum Henry (Christian Convery); the kids have ditched school for the day and gone off into the woods so Dee Dee can paint a waterfall, and Sari is soon trying to chase them down.  The kids find a package of the cocaine and try it out, though the effect on them is pretty much ignored.

And they’re hardly alone.  St. Louis drug kingpin Syd Dentwood (Ray Liotta, in his last screen role) must recover the lost cocaine or face the wrath of his Colombian suppliers, so he sends his loyal henchman Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to find the stuff, ordering him to take along Syd’s son Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), who’s grieving the death of his wife.  Simultaneously detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), hoping finally to get enough evidence to arrest Syd, travels south to find the drugs himself, leaving his new pooch in the care of his trusted partner Reba (Ayoola Smart).

At the ranger station where lovesick Liz (Margo Martindale) presides, awaiting the unwitting object of her affection, doofus wildlife-protector Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), Daveed is attacked by a trio of hayseed juvenile delinquents, Stache (Aaron Holliday), Vest (J.B. Moore) and Ponytail (Leo Hanna).  He dispatches them but is wounded in the process, and then commandeers Stache to lead him and Eddie to a gazebo where they’d hidden some of the cocaine.  Meanwhile Sari joins Liz and Peter in their hike into the woods.  Syd and Reba eventually show up as well, as do a couple of unlucky paramedics (Kahyun Kim and Scott Seiss). 

It would be a thankless task to try to catalogue the various characters’ encounters with the bear and one another.  Suffice it to say that as directed with energy but not much verve by Elizabeth Banks, the movie shifts frantically from one set of folks to another and that in the process bodies pile up, some dispatched by the ursine critter, which is at some times portrayed as menacing and at others as genially loopy, and some killed, accidentally or on purpose, by their fellow humans.  None of the mayhem is meant to be taken seriously, of course, which makes the amount of tension the movie can generate negligible, even during a finale on a ledge behind the waterfall.

But it is meant to make you laugh and wince simultaneously, which it doesn’t really manage to do, even when characters you might like are endangered.  In the chaos a few of the ensemble come off better than others—including Jackson as weary Daveed, Convery as little wiseacre Henry and Holliday as slacker Stache—but some, like Martindale and Whitlock, go way over the top to diminishing returns, while others, like Russell and Ehrenreich, just blandly fade into the background.  In his screen swansong Liotta simply simmers wearing a gargantuan wig; it’s hardly the late actor’s finest hour.

On a technical level, apart from the persistently unconvincing bear, the picture is pretty slick, with John Guleserian’s cinematography and Aaron Hayes’s production design more than passing muster, while Mark Mothersbaugh’s score hits some welcome notes of wryness.  Joel Negron’s editing can’t erase the abruptness in the transitions and the sloppiness of some of the action moments, but on the plus side he has trimmed things to a tolerable ninety-five minutes.

Does “Cocaine Bear” fall into the notorious “so bad it’s good” category?  Well, it’s not really that bad.  Nor is it actually good.  It occupies that nebulous middle ground where, after a big opening weekend based on high rumor-fed expectations, the overall reaction will probably settle into “meh,” with a shrug.  But by then it will have done some solid business and made a tidy profit on its modest budget.