{"id":13722,"date":"2025-12-27T17:43:25","date_gmt":"2025-12-27T22:43:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=13722"},"modified":"2026-01-17T21:02:26","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T02:02:26","slug":"anaconda-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/12\/27\/anaconda-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Anaconda (2025)\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Anaconda<\/strong> (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Columbia\/Action-Comedy-Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 99 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (violence\/action, strong language, some drug use, suggestive references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Tom Gormican\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: David Fleming\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Nigel Bluck\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: December 25, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, Ione Skye, Ben Lawson, Rui Ricardo Diaz, John Billingsley.<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ** \u00bd<\/p>\n

\u00a0I didn\u2019t expect greatness from Anaconda<\/strong> and that\u2019s exactly what I didn\u2019t get. This comedic reboot of the 1997 original has the same problem as most recent comedies; it\u2019s not as hilarious as it thinks it is. It\u2019s mildly amusing at best and only sporadically so. To its credit, it works better in the first half than the second. I\u2019ll explain as we go along.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Who says you can\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Griff returns home to Buffalo for Doug\u2019s birthday. It\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cBuffalo sober\u201d); lawyer Claire is recently divorced and still in love with Griff. Naturally, their passion project does not go smoothly.<\/p>\n

\u00a0When Anaconda<\/strong> sticks with its initial premise, it\u2019s 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<\/strong> hits a snag.<\/p>\n

\u00a0At this point, Anaconda <\/strong>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\u2019s disappointing, especially when you consider it\u2019s 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<\/strong> strays into conventional genre territory and loses its edge. It should have been more Living in Oblivion and less Jungle Cruise.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I can\u2019t really fault the cast for the movie\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I will concede that Anaconda<\/strong> has some pretty good snake effects. CGI has come a very long way since \u201997 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\u2019s terrible Paraguayan accent and the bad FX and the dopey dialogue. This Anaconda <\/strong>has all that too, but doing it intentionally isn\u2019t anywhere near as funny as it happening on its own.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Still, I chuckled a few times during Anaconda<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I wanted to like Anaconda<\/strong> more than I actually did. I even rewatched the OG which I hadn\u2019t seen since \u201998 when it premiered on cable. If anything, this reboot made me appreciate the original all the more. You can\u2019t beat the sight of a giant computerized snake swallowing and regurgitating Voight. God knows filmmakers will keep trying though.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anaconda (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Columbia\/Action-Comedy-Horror\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 99 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (violence\/action, strong language, some drug use, suggestive references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Tom Gormican\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: David Fleming\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Nigel Bluck\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: December 25, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, Ione Skye, Ben Lawson, Rui […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13724,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Anaconda-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13725,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13722\/revisions\/13725"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}