Director Tom Gormican’s Anaconda arrives with an irresistibly clever premise: what if two lifelong friends, obsessed with the gloriously bad 1997 creature feature, decided to travel to the Amazon and remake it on a shoestring budget — only to encounter a very real, very enormous snake? Childhood best friends Doug (Jack Black) and Griff (Paul Rudd) head deep into the Amazon to start filming their passion project, but things get real when an actual giant anaconda appears, turning their comically chaotic movie set into a deadly situation. On paper, it’s inspired. In execution, it’s considerably more uneven.
Gormican’s comedy takes place in a world where the original Anaconda exists, and the cleverly meta, high-concept premise gives the movie a zany energy off the top that it ultimately can’t sustain. The self-aware humor works best in the early stretches, when the film pokes fun at Hollywood’s remake culture and the delusions of amateur filmmakers. When it’s about the cheesiness of the filmmaking within the scrappy movie-within-a-movie, it delivers consistent laughs. But the momentum is fleeting.
The film’s biggest asset is its cast, and Black and Rudd do their best with the material. The two enjoy a snappy, lively chemistry that makes their friendship feel genuine. Steve Zahn, who plays their cinematographer Kenny, provides some of the film’s best running gags, and his anarchic energy is a consistent bright spot. Unfortunately, the versatile and talented Thandiwe Newton goes criminally to waste as Claire — a divorced lawyer, and that’s the full extent of her personality.
The screenplay is where Anaconda struggles most. Character motivations shift whenever the plot needs a shove, giving the story a stop-start rhythm that kills any momentum it tries to build. The film includes a running gag about how every movie needs to “be about something,” yet its attempts to add emotional depth — neatly labelling each lead with a backstory (the family man, the failing actor, the recent divorcé, the addict) — feel more like a proof of Hollywood’s formulaic approach than a parody of it.
Once Anaconda evolves into a standard action movie with real chases, explosions, and gunfire, it takes on a generically glossy sheen that makes it forgettable. A subplot involving illegal gold mining serves as dull filler. The CGI snake, which should be the film’s crowning set piece, underwhelms rather than thrills.
In the end, Anaconda isn’t a disaster, nor is it the sharp, self-aware reinvention it wants to be. It has charm, a handful of strong performances, and the occasional flash of the sillier, smarter film buried inside — but for all its winks and meta jokes, it never quite finds a comic rhythm or a point of view strong enough to justify its own existence. Much like its characters’ passion project, it’s a likable effort that never quite becomes the movie it’s trying to be.