By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Paul Rudd, Jack Black and Steve Zahn
Directed by Tom Gormican
Written by Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten
Sony/Columbia
“It has to be about something,” says Doug McCallister (Jack Black) as he and his best friend Ronald “Griff” Griffin Jr. (Paul Rudd) set out to shoot a homemade remake of the 1997 snake-camp sleeper ANACONDA. Actually, “homemade” isn’t quite accurate, as the duo trek to the actual Amazon to shoot their epic in this meta reboot. Credit whoever at Sony Pictures decided that their fourth redux of 2025 (after KARATE KID: LEGENDS, 28 YEARS LATER and I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER) should be more than a straightforward rehash, but that line points toward one of the issues that undermine the film. It attempts to tackle meaningful themes while also going for laughs and thrills, and the result isn’t nearly as funny as the first sequel, ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID, was without trying.
The irony is that the “about something” part leads to the movie’s most successful moments in the early going. Doug and Griff grew up making shot-on-video flicks and nursing big Hollywood dreams, before Griff moved to LA for an unsuccessful acting career and Doug settled for shooting weddings in their native Buffalo, unsuccessfully trying to convince his customers that their nuptial videos should have horror themes. Griff returns home to help celebrate Doug’s birthday, and the party involves a viewing of THE SQUATCH, a camcorder Bigfoot saga they made as 13-year-olds. Instead of a mocking tone, director Tom Gormican brings warmth and affectionate humor to Doug, Griff, their pals and Doug’s family, including Ione Skye (!) as his wife, watching the fruit of the guys’ childhood ambitions. It’s a likable and promising start.
Griff, who has managed to secure the rights to ANACONDA (involving a bit of retconning of the project’s origins), convinces Doug that they should finally realize those ambitions, leave their moribund lives behind and make their own snake saga. They’re joined by another old pal, druggie Kenny (Steve Zahn), and Griff’s childhood crush Claire (Thandiwe Newton). Once they arrive in the Brazilian jungle, they hook up with Santiago (Selton Mello), a local reptile handler who’s contributing his pet anaconda Heitor to the project, and run into Ana (Daniela Melchior), who’s on the run from some bad hombres.
So what we have here is a movie that’s trying to be a nostalgia piece about modern amateur filmmakers recreating the cinematic thrills of their youth (like a fictionalized version of the fan-film documentary RAIDERS!); a satire of Hollywood and its endless recycling of IP; a knockabout dude-bro comedy; and an action-horror film with real stakes courtesy of those human villains and an even bigger constrictor that emerges to threaten our heroes—all at once. No one approach ever quite takes in the script by Gormican and Kevin Etten, who previously teamed on the similarly self-referential THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT, starring Nicolas Cage as himself. This time, the all-over-the-placeness works against ANACONDA building up a head of comedic steam, and too many potentially funny ideas are introduced and then not sufficiently followed up on. The attempts to lampoon studio moviemaking feel particularly half-hearted and unrealized, and it doesn’t help that the setting and Black’s presence put one in mind of TROPIC THUNDER, which skewered the moviemaking game far more adroitly.
Black and Rudd are always likable presences who have fine buddy chemistry, but just aren’t given enough to say or do that’s especially clever here. Black lets a bit of his patented mania creep into his eyes as Doug tackles his script for THE ANACONDA (cf. THE BATMAN and THE FINAL DESTINATION), yet here again, the role as written feels like a watered-down version of his obsessively zealous Carl Denham in KING KONG. A few of the in-jokes land, while others are just funny peculiar (a LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE name-drop?). As for the anaconda itself, the big CG reptile has a couple of exciting scenes and one good jump-scare, but doesn’t appear quite as often as its titular billing would suggest, to the point where the characters even seem to forget about its threat a couple of times. That whole subplot about the bad guys chasing Ana could have been easily eliminated to give the snake more opportunities to do its thing.
Gormican et al. could also have gone for broke and made the snake attacks R-rated, which might have added some splatstick edge to the proceedings. There is some gross-out humor involving dead animals that’s protracted well past the point of getting laughs, and that also goes for a scene involving urination. Dropping in this sort of bodily-function stuff feels like an uninspired choice, and the song choices are equally pedestrian. When a certain member of the original ANACONDA cast (whose presence has been widely divulged in the marketing) shows up for a too-brief cameo, it’s signaled not by one of their own songs but by AC/DC’s much-used “Back in Black.” A certain passage from Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” is repeated more than once (so I’m sure no one will mind its paraphrasing in this review’s headline). And there’s a running joke involving Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait” that’s not as funny at any point as its use was in 1998’s URBAN LEGEND—another Sony picture that, inevitably, is heading for a reboot next year.
