It’s the movie that everybody has been talking about since the trailer dropped, and questions have been swirling around how much of this movie is actually ‘based on a true story’.
According to IMDB, the storyline goes like this: “An oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists, and teens converge in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine.”
Behold, the trailer:
Just a regular Friday night, right? No, but seriously, the trailer says the movie is based on a true story, so what part (or parts) of it are factual?
The actual story centres around Andrew Thornton, who was a narcotics officer and lawyer turned leader of a drug-smuggling ring in Kentucky known as ‘The Company’.
While returning from Colombia, Thornton threw bags full of the drug from his plane near Blairsville in Georgia before he also jumped from the auto-piloted plane.
However, Thornton’s body was later found in the driveway of a Knoxville resident where the Georgia Bureau of Investigations believe that he may have hit his head on the tail of the plane and then failed to open his parachute before plummeting to the ground.
As part of the investigation, Thornton’s plane was tracked and along the flightpath, officers discovered a dead black bear in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It was discovered that the bear had ingested one of the 10 bags of drugs – about 31kgs of cocaine – and overdosed.
So, up to here, it’s all true.
But from this point on, the movie strays from the whole ‘true’ part of the true story.
Back to the true stuff, the famous bear dubbed ‘Pablo Eskobear’ (LOL) has since been stuffed and on display at the Kentucky For Kentucky store in Lexington:
