Anaconda
Directed by Tom Gormican
Written by Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten
Starring Jack Black, Paul Rudd and Thandiwe Newton
Classification PG; 99 minutes
Opens in theatres Dec. 25
Similar to getting caught in the grip of a giant Amazonian snake, in which you have the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of the embrace causes your veins to explode, the experience of watching Tom Gormican’s new action-comedy Anaconda is a painful one.
A meta-reboot of the 1997 thriller that starred Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube, and whose most memorable moment features Jon Voight’s bile-covered Crocodile Dundee-like hunter getting upchucked by the title creature, this new version of Anaconda cements Gormican’s reputation as Hollywood’s go-to guy for torpedoing nifty concepts with deeply shoddy execution.
Jack Black, left, and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.Bradley Patrick/Supplied
In theory, a cheeky reboot of Anaconda could have been knowingly dumb fun. The fact that Hollywood has become desperate enough to wade back into this particular snake-pit of intellectual property is a solid joke, especially considering that this isn’t the first time that Sony Pictures has crassly extended the Anaconda ssssssssssssinematic universe.
Between 2004 and 2015, five sequels of increasingly diminishing returns were regurgitated into the world. So, the idea to make yet another Anaconda, but this time one that explicitly riffs on the sheer absurdity of such a moviemaking empire? That’s an act of showbiz ouroboros that I can get behind.
Unfortunately, Gormican – who previously fumbled a similar meta-referential conceit with the limp 2022 Nicolas Cage-plays-himself comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – has completely defanged the central gag. The punchlines don’t land, the action is sloppy, and every actor looks as lost as poor Owen Wilson seemed to be in the original film.
Black in Anaconda.Bradley Patrick/Supplied
The story this time focuses on a quartet of longtime friends who spent their childhoods dreaming of making it big in Hollywood, and for some reason hold a deep affection for the creature feature of the title. Today, though, Doug (Jack Black) is a bored wedding videographer in Buffalo. Griff (Paul Rudd) is a glorified extra who is barely making rent down in Los Angeles. Kenny (Steve Zahn) is an alcoholic and a pill-popper. And Claire (Thandiwe Newton) is the girl, a character so insultingly thin that we’re repeatedly told she has a “great career” but never informed as to what field that might be in.
Each of them facing their own midlife crises, the friends decide to recapture the glory days of their movie-mad youth to shoot an amateur remake of Anaconda, which Griff has somehow finagled the rights to from Sony Pictures. Off to the jungle they go, where they encounter all variety of lethal threats, from illegal gold miners to a very real (but also embarrassingly CG-rendered, and not in an intentionally bad way) giant snake.
Black and Rudd in Anaconda.Bradley Patrick/Supplied
With such an easy layup of a concept, you’d think that the jokes would write themselves – which, I suppose, was the same thinking that Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten had. The pair never resort to a “The snake is standing right behind me, isn’t it?” kind of sitcom shtick, but they get awfully close. It is hacky, tacky stuff.
Perhaps if the filmmakers were permitted to go the R-rated route, the scales would be tipped toward more fun than dumb. There are flashes in which you can see the production slither past its PG limitations – including one semi-bloody bit of mayhem – and briefly come alive with a wry kind of vulgarity. But then the sanitized survival instincts kick in, and we’re all back to wondering why such a typically dependable cast – which also includes a severely underused Daniela Melchior – wasted their time and ours.
To quote the poet Anthony L. Ray, perhaps better known as Sir Mix-a-Lot, my anaconda don’t want none, unless you’ve got buns, hun. And this big-screen baby? It’s got no back.