In 1997, Anaconda became a worldwide rage as the horror movie offered never-seen-before setpieces featuring a 40-foot snake terrorizing an A-list cast featuring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, John Voight, Owen Wilson and more. The 2025 movie is a sort of meta homage to that film. A group of small-town friends have idolized the cult 1997 hit and have grown up being movie aficionados. Doug (Jack Black) and Griff (Paul Rudd) have always wanted to make a film, something out-of-the-box and original like Anaconda. But, their lives snowball into distinctly different directions. Well into their forties, Doug ends up making wedding videos for newly married couples, while Griff is a down-on-luck actor struggling to find a meaningful role. Their gang also includes Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn) and they all reunite on Doug’s birthday in Buffalo. They all watch their childhood production called The Quatch, a backyard production of a pulpy-adventure where a Big Foot is the villain and young Griff and Doug are heroes. That inspires the four friends to reignite their passion of making a movie and they decide to shoot a reboot of Anaconda.
The setup in this movie is absolutely cute. The idea of a bunch of bumbling losers making a reboot of a cult horror hit is absolute scripting gold. It’s as novel a concept as Tropic Thunder (2008) was. Quite frankly, once Jack Black and Paul Rudd get into their characters, Anaconda does become a lot of silly, unapologetic fun. Standout sequences are when Rudd accidentally kills their movie’s lead animal star, an Anaconda named Heitor and then another sequence where Steve Zahn has to piss on Black’s leg because he’s been bitten by a spider. But the screenplay doesn’t have too many of these laugh-out-loud moments. Instead, the narrative tries to eke out action-comedy moments like the one’s we see nowadays in Dwayne Johnson movies like Jumanji and Jungle Cruise. In all honesty, that brand of humour doesn’t hold for more than 15 minutes in any setup.
Where Anaconda does excel is in its meta nature. Jack Black and Paul Rudd ace the comedy-of-errors routines like pros. Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton and Selton Mello (playing a Brazilian Anaconda expert) lend able support to the two leads and their misadventures. There’s an outrageous scene where a dead wild boar and a squirrel corpse are mounted on top of Jack Black to make him a bait for the Anaconda and its superbly funny in an OTT way. There are constant throwbacks to cult hits like Snakes On A Plane and an ever present hangover of Jack Black movies like King Kong, Be Kind Rewind and more, to engage the fans. There are a some cool cameos by Ice Cube and J Lo, too.
All in all, Anaconda is an easy watch and it offers more than a few chuckles too. One just wishes, director Tom Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten had paid a little more attention to creating the laughs and steered clear of the action-comedy tropes. Then, this one would have been an absolute riot.
Also Read: Jack Black & Paul Rudd announce the new cast of Anaconda
