(1.5 stars)
How many of you had a reboot of the campy 1997 ophiological horror flick “Anaconda” on your Christmas list? Too bad, you’re getting one anyway.
But wait! Those geniuses at Sony Pictures know you’re rolling your eyes at their latest retread, and it turns out they’re way ahead of you. You’ll want to sit down and do some exercises to limber up your brain before you try to process their supernova of perverse inspiration: Their new “Anaconda” is no mere reboot but in fact a midlife-crisis comedy about four pals who travel from Buffalo to the Amazon (as played by Queensland, Australia) to knock out a no-budget, guerilla-style remake of the 1997 Sony Pictures trash classic “Anaconda,” a fondly recalled object from their youths.
Still on the fence? Your stars are Paul Rudd and Jack Black, those winningly youthful 56-year-olds whose shtick is, like Rudd’s face, evergreen.
Truth be told, that portrait in Rudd’s closet is starting to sweat a bit in “Anaconda,” but the movie is still funny. Ish.
I mean, it’s cute.
Amusing.
Sporadically.
But funny? Funny like how “Superman” (the 2025 one) turned sweet-kid shutterbug Jimmy Olsen into the most irresistible man in Metropolis? Funny like the feral-children bloodbath finale of “Weapons”? Funny like the snowman threesome in “The Naked Gun”? (The 2025 one.) Funny like Michael Cera in “The Phoenician Scheme”? Like every single frame of Benicio Del Toro’s performance in “One Battle After Another”?
I’m afraid not. (I’m also afraid, not, because this “Anaconda” lays as rancid an egg as a creature feature as it does as a comedy.)
Look, humor is subjective and mysterious. I have proffered specific examples of things from The Cinema of 2025 that delighted me personally so that you, reader, may calculate your own probability of enjoying “Anaconda” (the 2025 one). Which in my objective, impartial, utterly science-based opinion contains nothing remotely as laughter-inducing as any of the aforementioned examples.
This is more like “Snakes on a Plane” without a plane, and it fails to heed the lesson of that 2006 shrug of a movie: You can’t engineer a cult classic. Only the audience has that authority. Only we can decide to reclaim, say, “Showgirls” or “The Room” or “Anaconda” as misunderstood masterpieces, vacating the harsh judgments issued against them when they were new. (The original “Anaconda” was in fact a hit, even if critics hated it. The point stands.)
The problem comes into clear focus when the credits reveal this “Anaconda” was hatched by writer-director Tom Gormican and co-writer Kevin Etten, the duo behind 2022’s not-that-funny, still-funnier-than-this “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.” That film featured Nicolas Cage as himself, making a plot point of the star’s financial woes and late-career lack of discernment. Gormican and Etten were also two of the five credited writers on last year’s grim straight-to-Netflix lega-sequel “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” which is to say they have lots of experience making things that ought to be much more fun than they are.
Unlike Cage in “Massive Talent,” Rudd and Black are not technically playing themselves, but they may as well be, so dependent is the film on the leads’ familiar comic personas. Black’s character, Doug, is a wannabe horror auteur and otherwise happy family man who feels constricted by his job making wedding videos. He’s haunted by the prevalence in his work life of Paula Cole’s 1996 hit “I Don’t Wanna Wait,” as though to remind us Black first really popped as that snobby record store clerk in “High Fidelity.” Rudd’s Griff went to Hollywood to become an actor, but his star has risen no higher than a multi-episode guest appearance on “S.W.A.T” (the 2017 one).
Rounding out this foursome of college pals are Steve Zahn as a cinematographer — well, a cameraman — whose substance abuse problems (“I’m Buffalo sober”) cause chaos, and Thandiwe Newton as a just-divorced former actor who might be game to rekindle her old fling with Rudd’s character. Newton is a marvelous performer, but you wonder if she might’ve made an enemy, given that her wigs in this movie are less convincing than the CGI snake in “Anaconda” ’97.
Brazilian actor and director Selton Mello, playing this film’s answer to the Jon Voight character from the original, gives the best performance here by a lot. He’s also the subject of the one needle-drop-as-joke that actually hits.
This thing is so leaden that one has ample time to reflect that Rudd, Black and Zahn were all between 28 and 30 when the original “Anaconda” came out. That’s not old, but it’s not fresh-out-of-school, getting-kicked-off-their-parents’-health-coverage young, either. This is such a petty nit to pick that I would never mention it if the movie didn’t point it out by having the 58-year-old Zahn’s idiot character suggest, idiotically, that the anaconda in “Anaconda” was a metaphor for young-adult problems such as finding your own health insurance.
“Anaconda” wasn’t even 1997’s funniest gorefest about hot young actors getting punctured and/or pulped — that would be Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers” — but there was an innocence to it. At least some of the creators involved were doing their damnedest to make a real movie. J-Lo was trying her best. Ice Cube was trying his best. Voight, playing a Paraguayan (!) snake handler, was trying … a thing. The movie peaked when the snake swallowed him whole, then regurgitated him, and the slime-coated, still-living rascal actually winked.
This “Anaconda” never stops winking. Its juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
PG-13. At area theaters. 100 minutes.
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