'Anaconda' Can't Quite Commit to Being 'Tropic Thunder'
It's snakes out there dis big?? Plus, an anecdote about Isiah Whitlock Jr, aka Clay Davis.
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Christmas to New Year’s: what a stupid week, am I right? Somehow it’s even worse for movies. It seems like all you do is hear about movies that aren’t actually playing near you while we critics mostly ignore the ones that are. That ends now.
It feels a little too early for my year-end list (most publications clearly disagree on this point), and I’ve already reviewed many of the big awards movies opening near you now. Beyond that, there isn’t much else. But the schools are off this week and I had my nephew to entertain, so I ended up taking him to one of the lone PG-13 releases I hadn’t caught yet. Options being thus limited, Anaconda it was.
In case you haven’t heard by now from the weirdly ubiquitous advertising, Anaconda (2025) is a reboot of Anaconda (1997), about some guys who are trying to reboot Anaconda. Directed by Tom Gormican and written by Gormican and Kevin Etten (both previously of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F), Anaconda (2025) stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn and Thandiwe Newton, as the rag-tag crew of a low-budget Anaconda reboot, who are also high school friends.
Is it a great movie? No, it is not.
While it’s tempting to be pedantic and holier than thou, to say that this venture was doomed from the start, that a comedic riff on Anaconda could never capture the genuine comedy of the original (“it’s snakes out there dis big??”), and that any attempt to do so would be to engage in the same kind of hat-on-a-hat thinking that gave us Cocaine Bear, or one of those other movies that seem to exist more as “clever” marketing campaigns than stories… but I’m not going to say that.
My hottest take is that this was not a terrible idea. Black, Rudd, and Zahn are a comedic dream team (not to mention a lovely collection of short kings), and a dopey reboot about a dopey reboot is in many ways the perfect vehicle for lampooning precisely the kinds of dopey exercises I was just describing. If we’re going to have IP cinema we might as well use it to make fun of IP cinema.
Which is to say: the problem with Anaconda (2025) isn’t the concept. The problem is that it can never quite commit to being Tropic Thunder. And so it gets caught somewhere in between Tropic Thunder (a brilliant show business satire written by show business lifers) and Briggsby Bear (a sweet little movie about the joys of making silly stuff with your friends, written by some guys who got famous making silly stuff with their friends). Anaconda does, to its credit, defy the natural expectations, of being a thin concept overstuffed with unfunny jokes and cringe callbacks. Unfortunately it does this by being a surprisingly rich premise without enough jokes. It does have a handful of genuine laughs, and a couple of genuine scares (at least for my popcorn-spilling nephew), all in service of a story that you never quite care about.
That being said, my 12-year-old nephew rated it a ten out ten. He said it was probably his “first or second favorite” movie. I asked if this was his second favorite, which was the first? He couldn’t come up with an answer to that, which either makes Anaconda his favorite movie of all time or another great time he will mostly forget after 20 minutes of playing Roblox or whatever. I’m not sure it’s that important of a distinction when you’re 12.
In any case, Jack Black plays Doug McAllister, a Buffalo wedding video producer trying to use his wedding video gig as a vehicle for his true passion: experimental filmmaking, mostly to the chagrin of clients, who just want a sweet Instagram reel they can post for their friends. In the first scene, Doug pitches a POV shot of a creature emerging from a sewer to a couple who ask whether he can just shoot a nice freeze frame of them high-fiving set to Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait.” Doug’s boss gives him a pep talk, explaining that if Doug can just dial back the artsy fartsiness, he’ll be able take over the whole business when the boss retires. “It’s a nice B+ kind of a life!” the boss explains.
Meanwhile, Doug’s old collaborator, Griff, played by Paul Rudd, is back in town to celebrate Doug’s birthday, all the way from Hollywood, where Griff toils as a struggling actor, best known for a three-episode arc on SWAT. In his introductory sequence, Griff gets fired from a two-line gig as an orderly in a hospital drama because he keeps switching his accent.
Later on, at the surprise party organized by Doug’s wife, played by Ione Skye of Say Anything (!!), Griff has brought his recently rediscovered VHS copy of the short film Griff and Doug made in high school: The Squatch, which also stars their high school pals, Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton). These two now work as Doug’s wedding video collaborator and as a lawyer, respectively, both more or less as professionally unfulfilled and creatively stifled as Doug. As the old video rolls, smiles are shared and passions rekindled as they all remember what a great time they once had making silly movies with their friends.
The next day, Griff reveals an ulterior motive for coming back to town: he has, through an unlikely set of circumstances involving the widow of the original novel upon which Anaconda was based who was a big fan of his three-episode arc on SWAT, acquired the rights to the Anaconda franchise. And now Griff wants to get the gang back together to shoot a low-budget reboot of Anaconda in the Amazon. It sounds a little crazy and a little kooky, but there’s no reason to belabor this point because if you don’t buy into this part of the story there isn’t much of a movie now is there? The gang all recount their favorite moments of the 1997 classic film Anaconda, curiously none of which includes the classic Ice Cube line read: “it’s snakes out there dis big??”
Seems weird! I feel like if you remember one thing about Anaconda, it’s “it’s snakes out there dis big??”
In any case, the stage is now set for a sort of comedic take on four friends going off to the Amazon jungle to be menaced by a giant snake, along with a song that will become a recurring gag, and ample material for surprise cameos.
Probably the biggest issue with Anaconda is that it employs this pretty solid setup to tell a story about four friends being menaced by a giant CGI snake, rather than for a story about four friends’ unlikely attempt to reboot the Anaconda franchise. The second version is much funnier, it’s the source of all the movie’s best jokes, and surviving the entertainment business is clearly something the filmmakers know much more about than surviving giant snakes. And yet the whole endeavor is basically trapped inside the pretense that this is a giant snake movie. It’s like IP filmmaking can’t help but be IP filmmaking, even when the goal is to skewer IP filmmaking. Some form of irony poisoning, perhaps.
Anaconda’s most representative scene—and you can see this in the trailer so I don’t consider it much of a spoiler—involves Jack Black’s character having been swallowed and regurgitated by the giant snake. The rest of the gang attempts to use his corpse as a decoy to escape the giant snake, duct taping a dead boar on Jack Black’s back and stuffing a dead squirrel into his mouth. Naturally, Jack Black’s character wakes up halfway through this process, and ends up having to run for his life with a dead boar duct taped to his back like a living totem pole.
It’s an idiotic and kind of funny bit (my personal sweet spot), not to mention an undeniably inspired sight gag. My nephew loved it. Yet the basis for this scene is the danger of the giant CGI snake, which never entirely plays, for probably obvious reasons. (For one thing, how would a corpse even be a good decoy for a predator with heat sensors? And yes, I do realize this is putting waaay too much thought into this). Meanwhile, a much richer story—about being involuntarily aged out of your chosen profession before you can find your place in it, and the desire to find creative fulfillment in an industry that only seems to care about giant CGI snakes and selling nostalgia for the late 90s—is right there. There’s a brilliant satire about Hollywood, IP recycling, and stifled creativity trapped inside Anaconda itching to get out, but that’s only occasionally touched upon and never fully explored (the opposite of your mom).
And so, Anaconda goes through the expected beats, with too much plot, “surprise” cameos, and an attempt at a grand finale, but since it’s all only ever in service of a giant CGI snake that we know isn’t real, rather than a creative conflict that is, the whole thing ends up feeling kind of limp, predictable, and a bit like the digression it is.
In one of those cameos, the script comes tantalizingly close to playing the actor’s persona off of a fictionalized “real” one that could’ve made for some great jokes, but in this too Anaconda only ever gets a fraction of the way there. And so, Anaconda ends up being a reasonably decent time, but also can’t help but feeling like a bit of a disappointment. Unless you’re 12. In that case, Anaconda is a triumph, not only hilarious, but by turns kind of scary too.
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