2025 | PG-13 | starring Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn | directed by Tom Gormican | 1 hr 39 mins | 1 1/2 out of 5 |
Two childhood friends, Doug (Jack Black) and Ron (Paul Rudd) finding themselves in life and career dead ends set off into the jungle with a small crew (Thandiwe Newton and Steve Zahn) to remake their favorite movie – the 1997 monster movie Anaconda – and end up fighting for their lives against a real-life giant anaconda.
It’s kind of amazing how this movie snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s a disasterpiece of execution that should be studied in film classes for why it failed with such a gaping yawn. Yes, yes, it’s another Tropic Thunder/Three Amigos story of actor finding themselves inside a real version of the movie they are making, but for that movie to be the Jennifer Lopez / Ice Cube semi-cult classic B-movie Anaconda is kind of a stroke of genius. For those too young for it – and they would be almost 30 years old by now – Anaconda rode in, and arguably created, a brief cheesy mid-budget monster/disaster movie craze of the late 90s and (through a perfect storm of big-name casting, terrible CGI effects and outrageous moments of questionable intention) became a surprise hit that captured the zeitgeist of a post-Independence Day audience eating up high camp as summer movie fun. Treating Anaconda with a level of nostalgic reverence that warrants a remake reboot/spiritual sequel is a very funny starting point for a meta satire of Hollywood remake culture. You’d think it would write itself. Likable cast, a few jabs at the studio, a comedy of errors and a genuine horror film on top of it.
Yet, Anaconda 2025 is a lesson that nothing is inherently funny. You’ve got to do something to spin it into something funny. That’s why this movie sits below movies that are bad and never had a chance, this movie could have been and should have been so much better. Missed opportunity doesn’t even begin to describe it. It looks and feels as though not a single person involved is invested in this idea. Not the cast, with Jack Black on autopilot and Paul Rudd sleepwalking through the picture. Not the director, Tom Gormican who made a very similar trip around the meta-Hollywood sun with the Nicholas Cage homage The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (another movie that should be a lot better than it is). Not anyone behind the camera, Anaconda is a lifeless and empty nothing of a time waster. It has pacing problems, editing problems, it’s shot almost entirely like a TV series. Nothing here comes together to spike up a pulse that is in any way fun or funny.
Playing script doctor with this movie would be too easy because its inability to get off the launchpad is obvious. Cliche characters with trope dialog making the most obvious, often repeated and above all safe, comments about modern movies. Going all the way back to the Straw Movie target from the 2020 Judd Apatow dud The Bubble, Anaconda again proves the rule that when movies mock bad movies, they never do it for the actual reasons that people complain about, they build up straw movies and knock those down with easy shots. This movie doesn’t even do that. Hell, this movie is so hands-off about poking the tiniest bit of fun at Anaconda they don’t even suggest someone could like the movie ironically. In the world of this movie, Anaconda is just a straight good movie, without the cheesy charm more worthy of a Mystery Science Theater riffing than a big summer reboot. In literal passing, it mentions a studio system out of ideas and re-defining the remake to make it not look like a remake, but it completely and totally accepts this conceit.
But should we play script doctor it would all be done on the technical level. The script is bland and the actors are asleep, but that’s actually secondary to the overall off tone and slow pace. First of all, the whole thing is too silly. Giving these guys an earnest unblinking reverence for Anaconda and a more sincere mission would have helped things. Then, I would attempt a genuine genre mix. When the big snake shows up, lean into making those segments scary. Instead of a hollow nothing this should have been a real horror/comedy with stakes, meaningful deaths and a serious threat. Those two tonal changes would have squeezed something out of the existing material, before you even got to the work of adding things called “jokes” to the script. Follow in the footsteps of great genre parodies that both poke fun at and then become the very thing they are ribbing.
I could see how someone might think, on paper at least, that it might be inherently funny to build to a scene where we think our main character is dead, put a squirrel in his mouth and tape a hog to his back to be bait for a giant snake. Maybe. But you’ve still got to zag somewhere into a joke. Anaconda is pretty inoffensive. You’re not going to walk out of it outraged as I have been with some movies scoring higher than this. It’s just a measure of what works and almost nothing at all works here. It’s kind of amazing. You’d think odds are something might work here if only by accident. It’s almost like you have to go out of your way and really try to make a movie this unbelievably joyless.