Anaconda (2025)
Directed by: Tom Gormican
Premise: A meta-style reboot of 1997 film. A group of filmmaking friends go to the Amazon to make a new version of their favorite giant killer snake movie. They find themselves fighting for their lives in a scenario that mirrors the movie they were trying to make.
What Works: 1997’s Anaconda was a straightforward action-horror movie about explorers in a struggle for survival against a giant snake. It was not a great movie but it was entertaining and had a distinguished cast including Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, and Jon Voight. The filmmakers of 2025’s Anaconda approach this remake as a comedy. An early gag sets the tone; Paul Rudd’s character walks past a Hollywood backlot display of movie posters including All that Jazz, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and 1997’s Anaconda. This is a movie about the love people have for not-so-great films, the kinds of pictures that touch us when we’re young and inspire filmmaking dreams. The best part of 2025’s Anaconda is the relationship between the four filmmakers. These middle aged friends set out to fulfill their unrealized dreams of making a Hollywood movie. That passion for filmmaking is appealing.
What Doesn’t: As much as 2025’s Anaconda owes to the 1997 film, it owes much more to 2008’s Tropic Thunder, a satire about the making of a Hollywood war film. Anaconda borrows a lot from Tropic Thunder, including actor Jack Black, but it is nowhere near as good. Anaconda is funny but only intermittently so. Like Tropic Thunder, Anaconda is intended as a Hollywood satire but the filmmakers here are supposed to be low budget and independent. Anaconda doesn’t satirize filmmaking very well. Satire requires sharpness and meanness and insight into the topic that Anaconda does not possess. It’s not even convincing as a production. The whole cast and crew are five people: two actors, a director, a cameraman, and a snake handler. No one is even recording sound. The storytelling is a mess. The film introduces a serious subplot of gold miners in the Amazon. A young woman (Daniela Melchior) on the run takes shelter with the crew, pretending to be a riverboat captain. The filmmakers of Anaconda don’t know what to do with her and the character enters and exits the story in a way that is inconsequential to the rest of the action. The filmmakers don’t seem to know what to do with anybody else either. The hint of romance between Paul Rudd and Thandiwe Newton’s characters is incomplete. Steve Zahn is wasted as the fumbling cameraman. The special effects are inconsistent. The giant snake often looks cartoonish.
Bottom Line: 2025’s Anaconda has a novel idea but it’s not done well. The movie plays as a Saturday Night Live sketch that’s been overextended to a feature length.
Episode: #1081 (January 4, 2026)