Dee Dee (Brooklyn Prince) is skipping schol so that she and her friend Henry (Christian Convery) can go and paint the waterfalls.
Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr) is taking his recently widowed friend Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) on a job in the great outdoors so that he can begin to heal and move on.
Aging cop Bob (Isaiah Whitlock Jr) decides to take a day off from his new dog, to follow up on a case.
And Sari (Keri Russell), a nurse on her day off, is fuming about having to go into the woods to find her daughter, who has skipped school, and is saddled with a pair of lovesick park rangers (an always welcome and secene-stealing esteemed character actor Margo Martindale, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, unfortunately not related to John Pyper-Ferguson... I think) the whole way.
But soon, they will clash with a bear who has developed a rather finnicky cocaine habit, and they are on its turf...
The title is pure meme fodder, but this film is a good time, you get exactly what it says on the tin. It could be a wacky, weird pisstake of monster movies, or embrace the absurdity of the concept and be a subversive 4th wall breaking joke, but in a refreshing and counter-intuitive kind of way it just plays is straight as an action comedy, so avoids a lot of the smugness and arrogant pretentious folly which could follow.
It's a fun, B-Movie with a Hollywood budget (kind of, it's actually a nice middle number, refreshingly) and it plays to its strengths: the 4 movies of the start (road movie, kids' adventure, renegade cop and wilderness survival) are fun enough to follow on their own merits (particularly Daveed and Eddie: O'Shea Jackson Jr is pretty much always the best thing about whatever he is in, and it's nice to have Ehrenreich in good films again, I like him as a performer) and the jokes land. When the bear enters the picture, director Elizabeth Banks (which is still weird to say) keeps the momentum going with a goofy sense of humour really quite unique to her, and I rather like it.
Standout sequences are a standoff at a gazebo, an ambulance playing "I Just Can't Get Enough", and the two children first finding a parcel of cocaine. Ray Liotta enters the picture as a coke lord, and has some fun with the film largely by playing it straight, and the film's idiocy and bimbling of its characters are where it shines. The soundtrack by Mothersbaugh is fantastic.
Also, just an observation: it's kind of strange seeing no Marvel Cinematic Universe in this.
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