Paul Rudd and Jack Black plays guys remaking Anaconda in this remake of Anaconda, appropriately titled Anaconda (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video). Got that? So, Today I Learned that Anaconda is an expansive franchise consisting of the 1997 original with Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Whatever the Hell Jon Voight’s Accent Is, as well as four sequels, a Chinese remake and then this new one, a meta-movie about people who love Anaconda so much they decide to make their own version of Anaconda. Now, do people who love Anaconda so much they decide to make their own version of Anaconda actually exist? Nah. But if anything needs to be poked fun at these days, it’s the relentless hovering specter of IP, so maybe this new Anaconda will justify its existence.
ANACONDA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open with some violent dithering in the Brazilian jungle involving a character named Ana (Daniela Melchior), whose name I think is a joke. The credits say her last name is Almeida, but, I mean, Conda was right there, wasn’t it? Perhaps this movie is above such jokes, but the following 90-odd minutes proves otherwise, so we’ll chalk it up as a missed opportunity for a lame unlaugh. Next we hear Jack Black’s voiceover – it’s a dead-serious heavy-duty hardcore-film-director description setting the scene… for a wedding video! The Black character, Doug McCallister, has clearly seen his dream of being a big-time moviemaker compromised all the way down to working for a guy who really wishes Doug would tone it down and shut up and make the fluffy nuptials video for the happy couple. Doug’s got a family to support after all, including a wife played by Ione Skye, so hey, shout out to Ione Skye, eighth-billed in Anaconda Twenty Twenty-Five, and make sure you feel a little sad about that.
Doug isn’t the only sad-sack sucko-tryhard in this movie, either. His bestie from way back is Griff (Rudd), a Hollywood resident who works at a big-box home-improvement emporium when he isn’t bragging about his four-episode arc on S.W.A.T. a while back. After he’s canned for treating a one-line cameo as Doctor No. 3 like an Oscar clip, Griff goes back home to Buffalo to attend old buddy Doug’s surprise birthday party. They reminisce over The Quatch, a bigfoot movie they made with friends Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) when they were kids who thought it was super-cool to drop prolific F-bombs in a creature feature to show their heavy Scorsese influence.
Griff blurts out that he acquired the rights to Anaconda for basically some pocket lint, and since nobody’s overjoyed with their creative lot in life, the four old friends scrape together four figures (six if you count the digits on the right of the decimal point) for a trip to the Amazon, where they’ll fulfill their dreams with a “spiritual sequel” to the giant snake movie. They’re also inspired by another chunk of pop culture from the late ’90s Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait,” specifically the lyric that goes “I don’t want to wait/For our lives to be over to make a ‘spiritual sequel’ to Anaconda,” although I think I may be paraphrasing.
So they venture to darkest Brazil, renting a normal-sized anaconda from a snakehandling weirdo with a Tommy Wiseau accent, Carlos (Selton Mello), and hopping a boat that belongs to Ana Whose Last Name Should Be Conda. As they shoot scenes and get coverage and roll sound and debate the need and method of headbutting during an action sequence, it seems like some unsavory types are pursuing Ana, thus somewhat explaining that cold open. Further complicating their adventure into the heart of darkness is an anaconda that could swallow the Burj Khalifa. Neither of these complications is particularly helpful in the pursuit of cinematic glory, but Jack Black and Paul Rudd never play guys who just give up on things, do they?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Director Tom Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten are trying to be the new kings of the meta-movie, having made Nicolas Cage-playing-Nicolas Cage movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – which was also kind of a soft dud, but a bit funnier.
Performance Worth Watching: Newton barely registers here (blame the writing), and Zahn, Rudd and Black all play to type. Tie goes to the Rudd-er though, because his shtick seems to have aged a little bit better.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: “When you can’t breathe, you can’t scream” is the tagline of the OG Anaconda, a so-bad-it’s-good sort-of-classic of crap cinema. The other thing you can’t do when you can’t breathe? Laugh. Everyone here flails – especially Black, in his trademark overzealous fashion – enough to suck the air out of the room, and all the funny with it. Not that the movie is particularly disagreeable, mind you. But it’s disappointing, its laughs mild at best, and rather sparse. The movie’s merely content to coast on the cheesy, self-referential premise and the goodwill of its game-for-anything cast.
So what we get is nutritionless semi-entertaining frippery that takes a few easy jabs at the cynicism of Hollywood productions and the exploitation of intellectual property, but doesn’t lean too heavily into satire – perhaps thankfully, because we’ve seen enough of that lately. But it doesn’t lean into much of anything, save for the nothing’s-gonna-stop-us camaraderie of old friends coming together in pursuit of a cheezy dream.
The entire movie just goes squish in an unmemorable fashion, as we step on some of the big obvious jokes (although we’re technically not stepping on them if we make them 15 minutes before the movie does) and skippity hop to the inevitable climactic moment in which our protags find themselves in a yawnworthy car chase, yelling bad dialogue over an oldie-moldy Motley Crue track. There’s a self-referential bit here in which a character opines that “every good film needs a bit of a twist,” as this film, Anaconda, drops a twist. Of course, some bad films also have twists. And I’m sorry, but this film is kind of bad. But I bet it’ll do gangbusters on Netflix.
Our Call: CGI’s better than ’97 at least. Other than that? Meh. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.