Anaconda (2025) Columbia/Action-Comedy-Horror RT: 99 minutes Rated PG-13 (violence/action, strong language, some drug use, suggestive references) Director: Tom Gormican Screenplay: Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten Music: David Fleming Cinematography: Nigel Bluck Release date: December 25, 2025 (US) Cast: Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, Ione Skye, Ben Lawson, Rui Ricardo Diaz, John Billingsley.
Rating: ** ½
I didn’t expect greatness from Anaconda and that’s exactly what I didn’t get. This comedic reboot of the 1997 original has the same problem as most recent comedies; it’s not as hilarious as it thinks it is. It’s mildly amusing at best and only sporadically so. To its credit, it works better in the first half than the second. I’ll explain as we go along.
Who says you can’t learn anything from the movies? I never knew some people regard the 1997 movie as a classic. Longtime friends Griff (Rudd, Ant-Man) and Doug (Black, School of Rock) certainly do. It’s been their dream since childhood to remake it. Life, of course, got in the way. Doug now works as a wedding videographer trying to turn happy couples’ wedding videos into horror films. Griff is a struggling actor in L.A. whose biggest claims to fame is a four-episode arc on S.W.A.T. Neither one of them is happy.
Griff returns home to Buffalo for Doug’s birthday. It’s then that he tells Doug that he owns the rights to Anaconda meaning they can legally do a reboot. Working with less than a shoestring budget, they head to the Brazilian rainforest with childhood friends Kenny (Zahn, Joy Ride) and Claire (Newton, Mission: Impossible 2). Goofball Kenny is a recovering addict (he’s “Buffalo sober”); lawyer Claire is recently divorced and still in love with Griff. Naturally, their passion project does not go smoothly.
When Anaconda sticks with its initial premise, it’s not bad. I got a few chuckles out of watching these not-too-bright people try to make a movie with very limited funds and resources. Of course, they run into many problems not the least of which is the sudden gruesome death of their snake. In need of another, they search for one in the jungle only to run into a bigger problem, namely illegal gold miners. This is where Anaconda hits a snag.
At this point, Anaconda evolves into a standard action movie with bad guys, gunfire and explosions. It becomes less clever when it falls back on the same tropes it satirizes in the first half. It never comes back from this misstep. It’s disappointing, especially when you consider it’s the work of Tom Gormican, the writer and director of the intelligent and funny meta Nicolas Cage comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. That one worked because it never lost its way. Anaconda strays into conventional genre territory and loses its edge. It should have been more Living in Oblivion and less Jungle Cruise.
I can’t really fault the cast for the movie’s problems, not too much anyway. Rudd and Black have made some decent movies. They have a good rapport here. Zahn plays the same lovable goofball he always plays. I don’t know what Newton is even doing here. She seems totally out of place. Daniela Melchior (The Suicide Squad) is okay as a boat captain who claims to be after miners. At one point, Doug makes her the star of the movie after a display of bad assery.
I will concede that Anaconda has some pretty good snake effects. CGI has come a very long way since ’97 and it shows here. I never felt like I was looking at a digital snake. At the same time, it takes away the charm of the original. Everybody knew it was a fake anaconda and treated it like a joke. Then again, that whole movie was a big joke what with Jon Voight’s terrible Paraguayan accent and the bad FX and the dopey dialogue. This Anaconda has all that too, but doing it intentionally isn’t anywhere near as funny as it happening on its own.
Still, I chuckled a few times during Anaconda. For me, the biggest one occurs early on when Rudd passes by three movie posters on the Columbia lot- Close Encounters of the Third Kind, All That Jazz and Anaconda. One of these things is not like the other. There are a couple of cameos I also found amusing, one everybody already knows about and the other at the end. But like I said, the chuckles are scattered and only mild.
I wanted to like Anaconda more than I actually did. I even rewatched the OG which I hadn’t seen since ’98 when it premiered on cable. If anything, this reboot made me appreciate the original all the more. You can’t beat the sight of a giant computerized snake swallowing and regurgitating Voight. God knows filmmakers will keep trying though.
