"Cocaine Bear" is a much better movie than it had to be. Based on a story ripped from the real-life headlines of 1985, it tells the tale of a large black bear that was padding through a Georgia forest one day when it came upon a duffel bag stuffed with fat packages of Colombian cocaine. The bag had been tossed out of a plane by a not-very-bright drug smuggler who neglected to open a parachute on his own way down to the ground. The bear was later found surrounded by ripped-up coke packages, dead from partying too hard. The animal's body was subsequently stuffed and is said to have briefly passed through the hands of country music star Waylon Jennings before being installed in a "fun mall" in Lexington, Kentucky, where it resides to this day, all traces of vintage blow presumably scrubbed from its snout.

This story could easily have been turned into one-joke trash like the 2006 "Snakes on a Plane," which initially stirred up keen anticipation among Z-movie connoisseurs, but which turned out to contain exactly one memorable line (Samuel L. Jackson's deathless "I have had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane!")

"Cocaine Bear" has been much more carefully crafted by its director, the veteran actor Elizabeth Banks, who knows hit movies from the inside (she has featured in all four of the "Hunger Games" films and three "Pitch Perfect" pictures). She also has no reservations about raunch (recall her bath-nozzle scene with Seth Rogen in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" (2005) or gore (she ladles out dismembered limbs and chewed-off faces with relish). So, as unlikely as it might seem, Banks was an excellent choice to helm this movie.

She also assembled a lively cast: the late Ray Liotta (in his last film role) as a high-level drug trafficker; the great Margo Martindale as a love-starved forest ranger; O'Shea Jackson Jr. as a dealer who can't believe the stupidity of some of the yobs he has to work with; and Keri Russell as the angry mom of 12-year-old Brooklynn Prince — Willem Dafoe's precocious co-star in "The Florida Project" (2017). "Euphoria's" Aaron Holliday has some funny scenes as a droll bottle-blond punk; and Isiah Whitlock Jr., playing a local detective, also gets a laugh or two. ("Step five to 10 paces away," he tells a puzzled suspect.)

The script, by Jimmy Warden, follows the original events in an approximately accurate fashion, and the titular bear — a computer creation that's nevertheless slaveringly lifelike — holds the screen with something very like a personality. Some of the cleverest touches in the picture pass by almost subliminally. (At a tourist attraction called Cagney Caverns, we get a quick background flash of a sign that reads, "Visit the Original Glory Hole.") The movie is unusually well-shot for this sort of genre production, especially a stormy night scene toward the end. Speaking of which, the film's conclusion follows its opening by just 95 minutes (thanks, Liz). Finally, if it need be said, stick around for the credits.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.