What’s It About

A midlife crisis inspires Doug (Jack Black) and Griff (Paul Rudd) to head into the Amazon rainforest to remake their favorite film from their youth, but everything changes when a real giant anaconda shows up, turning the comically chaotic set into a deadly situation. The movie they’re dying to make? It might just kill them.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

I wanted to love this movie. It’s December, and I really want to see something spectacular. The concept behind this new Anaconda is actually pretty clever when you think about it. You got four middle-aged friends who used to make low-budget horror movies together back in middle school, and now they’re trying to recapture that magic by remaking the 1997 Anaconda on basically no money. It’s like if Be Kind Rewind met a creature feature, and on paper, that sounds amazing. But here’s the thing: having a good idea and actually pulling it off are two completely different things. Director Tom Gormican, who did that Nicolas Cage movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, teams up with writer Kevin Etten to give us this meta-comedy that’s supposed to poke fun at Hollywood’s obsession with recycling old movies. The problem is, they spent so much time being clever about the concept that they forgot to make it actually funny. And when your comedy isn’t funny, you’re in serious trouble. The movie follows Doug McCallister, played by Jack Black, who’s living what he calls a “B, maybe B+ life” in Buffalo, New York. Dude’s married with kids and spends his days shooting wedding videos while pretending they’re real films. His best friend, Griff, played by Paul Rudd, is a struggling actor in Hollywood who can barely keep a job as an extra on SWAT. Then you got their other friends: Claire, played by Thandiwe Newton, who just went through a divorce, and Kenny, played by Steve Zahn, who’s trying to stay sober in Buffalo, which apparently means he only drinks beer and alcohol now. Make that make sense. Griff comes back to Buffalo for Doug’s birthday with this wild pitch: he claims he bought the rights to remake Anaconda for cheap, and he wants the whole crew to fly down to Brazil to shoot their own version in the actual Amazon jungle. After some convincing, Doug agrees, and the four of them head south with about nine thousand dollars and a dream. Naturally, everything goes wrong. They lose their trained snake, run into some dangerous gold smugglers, and end up face to face with an actual giant anaconda that wants to eat everybody. Now, here’s where things get messy. The original 1997 Anaconda wasn’t some masterpiece, but it worked because it took itself seriously. Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, and even Jon Voight with his ridiculous accent played it straight, which somehow made it entertaining. This new version tries to be a parody, but it can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it a comedy making fun of Hollywood? Is it an action movie? Is it a horror film? The answer is none of the above, really. It’s just kind of is, existing without much purpose. Jack Black does his best with what he’s got. His physical comedy is on point, especially in this one scene where he’s running from the snake with a dead boar taped to his back and a squirrel in his mouth. That sequence actually works because Black knows how to use his whole body for laughs. But the rest of the time, even he can’t save the weak material. It’s like watching a talented musician trying to play a broken instrument. Paul Rudd is usually money in comedies. The guy has made millions playing the lovable idiot, and normally that works. But here? His character Griff is just annoying. He lies to his friends to get them to make this movie, he does something really disgusting in the middle of the film that’s supposed to be funny but just makes you dislike him more, and he never really redeems himself. Even when he gets fired from his small acting job early on, it’s because of his own stupidity. There’s a difference between being endearingly dumb and being a willfully incompetent jerk, and Rudd lands on the wrong side of that line. Thandiwe Newton feels completely out of place. She’s a serious actress who doesn’t fit this type of comedy, and they don’t help her out with some truly terrible wig choices. Steve Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings almost nothing to this role. The only person who actually stands out is Selton Mello as Santiago, the emotional snake handler who has this weird connection with his pet. He steals every scene he’s in, but they get rid of him way too early in the movie. The biggest problem is that the film tries too hard to be meta without giving us characters we actually care about. None of the main four have any interesting personality traits. They’re just bland, and that blandness transfers to the performances. Even when they’re in dangerous situations, it’s hard to invest because the filmmakers never made the effort to make us care about them as people. You can’t just rely on the actors’ natural charm and expect that to carry a whole movie. The comedy itself falls flat most of the time. They spend several minutes on a joke about someone having to pee on Doug after a spider bite, which isn’t even the right treatment for spider venom anyway. The jokes feel forced and cringy, like the writers were trying too hard, it was late, and everybody wanted to go home. There were maybe three or four moments in the entire theater where people actually laughed, and that’s not a good sign for a comedy. The second half of the movie loses focus completely. They discover that Sony is filming their own official Anaconda reboot in the same jungle, which could have been funny, but instead, the plot just gets messier and more contrived. The actual snake barely matters to the story. It shows up, attacks some people, swallows a few characters who somehow come out completely fine later, and disappears again. For a movie called Anaconda, the actual anaconda feels like it was thrown in after the script was finished. Then the editing is choppy, the continuity doesn’t make sense, and important story parts seem to be missing. What’s frustrating is that you can see the potential. There are moments where the movie almost works, like when they make fun of how hard it is to fund independent films or when they joke about Hollywood’s lack of original ideas. Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube even show up in cameos as characters from the original movie, and those scenes work because they’re played as silly as possible. But these moments are too few and far between. The original Anaconda has become+ a cult classic because it’s a terrible movie that talented people played straight, which made it accidentally hilarious. This new version tries to be funny on purpose and fails. It’s nowhere near as sharp or memorable as Tropic Thunder, which understood how to satirize Hollywood while still being entertaining. Instead, Anaconda is just forgettable. In a few weeks, most people won’t even remember it existed. If you’re looking for a fun creature feature with some laughs, just watch the 1997 original. At least that movie knew what it was. This reboot had all the right pieces—a solid cast, an interesting concept, talented people behind the camera—but couldn’t put them together in a way that works. Sometimes having a clever idea isn’t enough. You actually have to execute it, and that’s where Anaconda slithers off course and never recovers.

OUR RATING – A BADLY EXECUTED 4