Movie Review: ‘Anaconda’ (2025)

Director: Tom Gormican

Cast: Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior

Plot: Two childhood friends and aspiring amateur film-makers head to the Amazon to produce an indie remake of B-Movie monster flick Anaconda.

Review: Look, I’ll be honest. I was lucky to be invited to an advance screening of this movie sometime in mid-December but the review didn’t happen. This was in part because of the madness of the Christmas season…and in part because I struggled to recall much of the experience. This is a movie with some solid selling points – a top tier comedic cast, a unique meta premise and a bit of a prod at the film industry that also celebrates the passion that brings people into the business.

But when you put it all together on the silver screen…it amounts to very little.

Doug (Black) and Griff (Rudd) grew up making no-budget amateur action films. As adults, Doug is shooting wedding videos and Griff is an unemployed actor. Feeling unhappy with their lot in life, Griff obtains the rights to a favourite movie of theirs, schlocky B-Movie Anaconda, and convinced Doug to make their indie version of the film on location in the Amazon. Joining them to operate the camera and fill out the acting roles are their friends Trent and Claire (Zahn and Newton respectively). Not long into the shoot, the snake they brought in for the title role is accidentally diced into pieces in a boat propeller forcing them to go deeper into the jungle to find a new animal.

This experience presents its own obstacles including gold smugglers, bounty hunters, an official Sony remake of Anaconda and, most notably, a gargantuan monster anaconda terrorising everyone. The only thing that can save them is friendship and plot contrivances.

Whilst there’s some themes concerning the magic and passion of film-making even at the lower tiers of the industry, this film doesn’t have much to say beyond that. There’s a conflict between the scrappy indie production team and the slick, big budget film-crew, but this only comes into play when they pass by each other on the river, and then the big crew gets killed by the giant snake off-screen. There’s the impression of Sony poking a bit of fun at themselves so long as they don’t dare say anything actually critical or insightful.

This kind of no-stakes drama is consistent throughout the film, with many issues faced by the characters resolving themselves off-screen. There’s a certain degree of laziness with the film-making…in one scene the characters fail to notice that they’re running into a dead-end because it was off-screen. There’s no reason they wouldn’t see the high wall that’s directly in front of them, so the camera is positioned so the audience doesn’t see it until required. What would count as a particularly fun series of twists was entirely spoilt in the trailers, so that’s a wash.

So the film falls flat in storytelling and concept, but it is a whacky comedy…let’s consider the comedy itself. It’s got a good couple of chuckles throughout and it’s impossible not to find Black, Rudd and Newton to be charming and fun. There’s fun to be had, but it’s not enough to carry this adventure.

Rating: FOUR out of TEN