I think we’ve reached a new form of soulless Hollywood reboot -the meta-reboot. Where a movie makes abundantly clear it knows how tired we all are of the schtick and throws a big lampshade over the whole thing to give the impression it is a clever commentary on the reboot machine, but is for all intents and purposes no different from any more commonplace attempt to recycle a brand. The Naked Gun had a few gags towards this theme, but wisely didn’t make it the entire premise -also it was genuinely very smart and funny. Anaconda does make it the entire premise, and it is not particularly smart or funny.
Anaconda (1997) was not even ever that beloved a movie to begin with, outside of a cult audience that developed around its B-movie silliness -not unlike Tremors. Though Tremors actually was aware of what it was -unlike Anaconda which tried to take seriously its schlocky effects and schlockier performances. But I guess come 2025 it was one of the few franchise titles that Sony owned and people remembered and hadn’t been exploited yet in the reboot cycle. Writers Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten (Gormican also directs) came up with a cute conceit, but the shallowness is still front and centre no matter how many times they wink to the audience.
Paul Rudd plays Griff, a weary and unsuccessful actor in Hollywood, childhood best friends with Jack Black’s Doug, once an aspiring movie director who now does freelance videographer work in and around their hometown in Vermont. While reuniting for Doug’s birthday and bonding over an old movie they shot together as kids, Griff reveals he has acquired the rights to their favourite movie Anaconda, and persuades Doug to reboot it with him as a low-budget indie film. Alongside fellow childhood friends Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn), they travel down to Brazil to shoot the film on location in the Amazon, where they soon encounter a real giant snake terrorizing the area.
The plot of a film crew stumbling upon real horrors while shooting a movie in the depths of an exotic jungle hearkens strongly to King Kong -a connection emphasized all the more by the fact that Black is playing essentially the same character he did in Peter Jackson’s 2005 film with merely a modern filter added on and a few of Black’s more contemporary acting quirks. In fairness, he’s not mugging through a lot of the movie or playing into his usual tropes of nonsense singing or hyperbolic deliveries -compared to Minecraft or Mario it is a reigned-in performance. But it is not distinct or interesting by any measure. Indeed it is the third or fourth jungle-set comedy released around the holidays that Black has done, and beyond its initial novelty it doesn’t feel any different.
Even Rudd, likeable and charismatic in everything, seems bored through chunks of the film, while his character arc couldn’t be more banal. You know from the start there is something suspicious to the notion of a no-name actor acquiring the rights to an intellectual property, and it pans out exactly as you would expect. There’s no effort in any other segment of character drama -a theme of the recently divorced Claire getting together with Griff is backgrounded a little bit but never explored, and the alcohol problem of Kenny -which has made him an unreliable collaborator for Doug- only ever arises in the context of a joke. Zahn for his part, is very invested in his comic performance here, but he is about the only one -apart from perhaps a scene-stealing Selton Mello (of I’m Still Here) as their guide and snake wrangler Santiago, predictably gone from the movie much too soon though.
Still there is surprisingly little of the titular anaconda through the movie until the climax, as the film incorporates a few different subplots involving illegal gold miners and their connection to a woman called Ana (Daniela Melchoir) who joins the expedition, and after some fighting of her own and the accidental loss of their original snake, becomes a de facto lead for the movie, prompting jealousy in Griff. Additionally, the crew briefly cross paths with another much more elaborate film crew. These plot beats barely sustain any tension as you just wait for them to be violently resolved by the giant snake. In the meantime the heroes manage to largely avoid it, and occasionally get caught in their own little comic distractions, such as a scare where Doug is bitten by a venomous spider while wandering through the jungle forcing a drawn-out sequence of Kenny having to pee on the bite (universally understood as a myth by this point, but don’t let that get in the way of cheap toilet humour).
The anaconda itself is a decent effect for its first couple appearances, Gormican composing the encounters in a way that consciously evokes Jurassic Park. But it does quite quickly become a generic CGI monster with kills that aren’t even that interesting or creative. We rarely see it eat its prey whole as anacondas actually do -more often it suffocates them or picks them off fast perhaps as a means for the movie to hang onto its comic tone -even the bit where Doug is temporarily taken by the snake, as seen in all of the trailers, is rather visually mundane. None of the filmmaking in fact is very impressive, doing little to add to the tension or even explore the world. It takes little advantage of its environment -Australia standing in for Brazil, and even through a typically action-oriented climax offers little in the way of compelling energy, taking place all through an abandoned film set rather than in the jungle -the anaconda itself obscured through huge chunks of it. We never even see the creature at all in its full profile.
Rudd and Black get some funny moments in, and they seem to be of the kind improvised on set. But what moments of character development they are treated to are rather dull. The comradery of their childhood friendship is of course the tether, their old movie something of an idol to this (the quality of which and style of shooting suggests characters a lot younger than their actors), but it is a pretty basic friendship-trumps-all kind of thematic core that the two can play feasibly in their sleep. Though a part of it, Newton and Zahn are left a little sidelined within this, their role in the long friendship underplayed other than the riffing that goes on between Doug and Kenny and a half-remembered romantic tension between Griff and Claire.
The meta references continue through the movie, endeavouring to sustain it in vain -down to a last desperate mid-credits scene. Some of it is funny but in that highly subjective way to people who pay attention to the economics of Hollywood, rights-issues and that sort of thing. But it is pretty much the only leg that Anaconda has to stand on without being just exactly the thing it mocks. Even with that conceit there really isn’t a whole lot more to it though -it is just as shallow as the empty reboot it alludes to and nowhere near as interesting as the mockingly ‘serious’ script Doug and co. try to shoot that is supposedly more meaningful. Wearing a different snakeskin doesn’t change a thing.
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