Bad movies can find a special place in your heart. I know this is a weird thing to hear from someone who is so objectively snobby about films and TV, but it’s true. And I’ve never hidden when I enjoy or even come to love bad movies. 2 Fast 2 Furious, Point Break, Congo, Lake Placid, Gone in 60 Seconds, etc,; these are the kinds of movies that become cult classics because of how they make you feel rather than how well they’re made. Whether a movie is good or not doesn't always have that much of a bearing on whether you like it or not. Sometimes it’s the subject matter, sometimes it’s someone in the cast, sometimes it’s just the vibe; how or why you like something doesn’t really matter. As long as you like it, that’s enough. Most of the time, anyway. So when some friends are in a rut and they want to reboot their favorite movie from when they were kids, it’s not that strange that the movie is Anaconda, the 1997 campy creature feature starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, and Jon Voight’s accent. In this case, it takes the form of 2025’s reimagining/soft reboot/spiritual sequel Anaconda, a meta-horror-action-comedy. There’s no way they’re trying to do too much in one 99 minute PG-13 movie, let’s get into it.
Welcome to the jungle. It just looks like a bank in Buffalo.
We start with Ana, played by Daniela Melchior (The Suicide Squad), in the jungle being pursued by armed gunmen. When the action is over, a giant snake eats someone. Yup, we’re in an Anaconda movie now. So let’s head over to the exotic location of Buffalo, NY, where Doug McCallister, played by Jack Black (A Minecraft Movie, Be Kind Rewind), lives life as a wedding videographer with delusions of grandeur but who is otherwise very stuck. Don’t worry, we’re getting back to the jungle. So over in LA, Ronald “Griff” Griffin Jr., played by Paul Rudd (Role Models, Ant-Man) is getting fired from a gig as an extra after a rough career as an actor. Time for the jungle. So he, along with childhood friends Claire Simons (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny Trent (Steve Zahn) manage to come together and surprise Doug for his birthday back in Buffalo. While out, Griff drops that he now owns the rights to their favorite movie, Anaconda, and he wants to film it guerrilla-style in the jungle with all of them, just like they did when they were kids. Obvious deception complete, they head down to the Amazon.
Our characters making a bad Anaconda remake while making a bad Anaconda remake. So meta.
And from there, the movie happens. And I mean that; the movie just seems to happen. There’s very little story from scene to scene, with random moments of attempted comedy or an attempted serpentine jump scare. There’s no one to root for, there’s no one to like, there’s no real conflict until far too late into the movie, and when it comes down to it, the movie doesn’t have any idea what it’s about or who the antagonist is. I heard that on the set of Jurassic Park, Stephen Spielberg banned the word “monster” from being used to describe the dinosaurs. They were not the villains, they were not evil, they were not monsters. They were nature. Animals doing animal things. It was a rule from which franchise has strayed and suffered for it (though not financially, I should note).
In Anaconda, the snake does seem to be pretty evil for no reason, but true villain is the writing. One second there’s a big twist and then in that very scene, the twist is rendered meaningless. Calling it a B-plot is elevating it way above it status. It was just stuff that happened. The attempt to go meta and call out the lack of creativity in Hollywood right now is endearing, I suppose, but it points out how devoid of any originality Anaconda is. I mean, a meta action-comedy about a film crew in the jungle where things go horribly wrong due to unforeseen circumstances that cause them to band together for survival has been done before. And better. And by Jack Black already. They called it Tropic Thunder back then and it was an actually brilliant comedy that told a meta story and was interesting and funny from moment to moment. There was also a movie about a group of people who go into the jungle on a boat and run into an unexpected creature that they have to capture on film as humanity and nature clash in a place where nature has the upper hand. It was called King Kong and Jack Black was in that too! There was nothing wrong with any of the acting here. Paul Rudd is his usual charming self; much like my affinity for Keanu Reeves, I’m a big Paul Rudd fan and I want to go give all his movies a chance. Jack Black is at his most palatable for me; not the over the top hallucination he was in Minecraft, but not quite as tamped down as he was in The Big Year. Pretty good sweet spot for him. Steve Zahn is always reliable. And Thandiwe Newton is incredibly talented, so this was not a stretch for her. You can tell when they’re acting as their characters in the movie and you can tell when they’re intentionally acting poorly when they’re doing their film. As many problems as this movie has, acting is not one of them.
A will they/won’t they for the ages. Eat it, Ross and Rachel.
The biggest issue that Anaconda has is that it attempted to be so many things. It wanted to be meta, but it came off as lazy. In a moment that had me rewinding and putting the subtitles on, I saw that Steve Zahn’s character was called Kenny Trent and then Thandiwe Newton’s character said she divorced her husband who is also called Trent. Now, first name versus last name and it has zero bearing on anything story-related other than to open the default romance option of Paul Rudd, but there are about a dozen named characters in this movie and the name Trent comes up twice? They couldn’t think of any other names? It wanted to tap into horror, but there was never any suspense or dread. Even horror-comedies have to deliver on the horror, and this didn’t. It wanted to have big action sequences, but they look terrible due in large part to the big CGI snake they’re running from. It looked and felt like a movie that was being described to the actors as they had to film the scene on the spot. It wanted to be a comedy, but it failed to deliver consistently on the laughs. There are a few chuckles here and there, but it couldn’t ever make me feel like I was having a good time. And worst of all, it wanted to say something and it missed the mark completely by not committing. Every small moment of humanity falls flat because the story doesn’t emphasize any aspect of itself. It gives you tonal whiplash as a result. This should have been a film about a group of friends rediscovering the joy of life after getting back to the things they loved. And the adversities they faced along the way, including giant snake shaped ones. But they wanted to play inside baseball and poke fun at the creative process without the chops to back it up.
Hammond and Grant look over at the destruction at Jurassic Park and wonder if life truly will find a way
Look, I know this process well enough and it matters to me enough to know that caring this much is at least a little silly. And I don’t mind having that poked fun at. At the end of the day, most hobbies and interests are at least a little silly. But a lot of life is lived those silly moments; I wouldn’t trade it. That’s why we roast our friends or play the dozens; we keep each other in check. But a joke is only funny if the joke is actually funny. There’s more to a joke than a setup and punchline, there’s an internal logic to the joke that leads to an unexpected, but earned subversion of expectation that results in a physical response. In this case, a laugh. I’m guilty of holding comedy to an incredibly high standard because in many ways I think it can be the truest form of audiovisual literature. I also think there’s something noble about setting out to make people laugh and bring joy to them by giving of yourself. Anaconda didn’t do that. I wanted it to. I didn’t take notes the first time I watched this movie because I hoped that it would either be so unexpectedly funny that I wanted to be immersed in the moment or that it would be so mediocre that I wouldn’t have anything to say about it. But it ended up that special kind of mediocre that still somehow got my attention. Because I wanted to like this. I wanted the critics to be wrong (47% RT at time of publication) and they just weren’t. Not this time. Watch it win Best Picture.
Traffic jams, am I right?
Anaconda is streaming on Netflix, but there are better movies to watch with your time. Even if you want to stay in the family friendly realm, the Jumanji movies are funnier, more smartly written, and have better action sequences. And Jack Black is in those too! He ends up in the jungle almost as often as Dwayne Johnson. Or go watch the original Anaconda, it’s also bad, but in a better way. There are remakes of bad movies that make them better or make them different. Ocean’s 11 immediately springs to mind. So does The Thing, which was so much better than the 1951 movie on which it was based that most people are surprised to find out it’s a remake. 2012’s Dredd with Karl Urban leaves Judge Dredd in the dust. You don’t have to do a bad remake just because you started with a bad film. But this time they did. I mean, Jungle Cruise was better. Look at the words this movie is making me say. I just had to say that Jungle Cruise was better than something. What a day.
Paul Rudd searches for a cohesive narrative and some decent jokes. They’re in a jungle, but it’s a comedy desert.