Anaconda (2025)

★½
Tom Gormican's Anaconda is a clunky man-vs.-nature comedy that contains one hysterical joke that fully earns its laugh but has absolutely nothing else going for it. It is not a remake of the 1997 original starring Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube but rather an acknowledgement that the 1997 original was a movie, and that it is ripe for a remake by a small group of filmmakers. Calling this a small group is an understatement. It's just four people—two actors and two on crew. The premise of this story is that Ronald "Griff" Griffen (Paul Rudd) acquired the rights to the Anaconda source material and desires to make it into a movie. He recruits childhood buddy Doug (Jack Black) to direct, friend Claire (Thandiwe Newton) to costar and other friend Kenny (Steve Zahn) to record sound, with jobs interchangeable depending on who needs to appear on screen.

Griff, Doug, Claire and Kenny travel to Brazil and charter a boat to sail up the Amazon to shoot scenes in the jungle. They enlist the help of snake wrangler Santiago (Selton Mello), while local woman Ana (Daniela Melchior) tags along because shady characters are after her. They venture into the Amazon Rainforest to start shooting, but a real anaconda snake stalks them. The movie is a collision of a buddy comedy and creature feature, and it's terrible at both. On the one hand, the players bicker for laughs due to their pseudo alpha male personalities, but all it does is irritate instead of entertain. On the other hand, the giant snake launches its attack on them and other unfortunate souls in the jungle, and that's where the movie ultimately fails. It does not successfully mesh the two genres together, so what we have is a snake that is real threat to the protagonists, and we have the humans who are too busy getting on each other's nerves to take their situation seriously.

This is a movie that should take the creature aspect seriously. The anaconda is driven only by its need to feed, which is fine (it worked in the original), but Griff and Doug are presented as a comedic pair who treat the snake like a thrill ride instead of a dangerous adversary that killed off a competing film crew that is also shooting a remake of Anaconda (which causes a moment of distrust in the Griff/Doug partnership, but whatever). They come up with a plan to kill the snake using pyrotechnics left behind by the big budget production, but upon execution it's like a roller coaster. Brody, Quint and Hooper didn't always get along in Jaws, but they respected the shark instead of behaving like there's an audience expecting them to rag on each other.

The small cast and crew really annoyed me. It's four plus two if you count the local hired hands. Bobby Bowfinger managed to scrape together a bigger cast and crew with a $2184 war chest, in contrast to this team, which is essentially making a Sweded version of Anaconda (Jack Black also starred in Be Kind Rewind). The subplot involving illegal gold miners was totally underdeveloped and existed solely to allow the snake to eat people other than the main cast. About that. One of the four does get gobbled up, and what happens post-regurgitation surpasses Jon Voight's amusing wink in the 1997 film by a mile. It's almost worth the price of admission for that alone. Unfortunately, the scene comes and goes, and then it's back to business. This is the kind of movie I expect from Jack Black, but what is Paul Rudd doing here? Ditto for Thandiwe Newton.

An unsettling thought occurred to me at the end. If Griff and Doug's movie were to be released, then it would feature a wild animal that killed a lot of people—including friend Santiago—on its way to the big screen. Their remake stops short of being a snuff film, but the body count is so high that it would take a tremendous amount of indifference for them to showcase it. I think director Gormican and cowriter Kevin Etten realized this and tried to cheat with a mid-credit revelation. The more I think about it, the more I dislike it. Cameos by Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez fall flat. Steven Zahn acts like his goofball character from suburbia. Anaconda has a snake that slithers, but the movie itself sputters along and jump starts itself with its jokey narrative before settling back into its mundane routine.

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