Review: Anaconda (2025)

I've rarely seen a movie work so hard to undercut itself as the new Anaconda movie does. The premise is fair enough: a group of pals (Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn) who used to make films together as children find themselves at various crossroads, including a dead-end job, an acting career going nowhere, and divorce. In an attempt to reclaim their former joy, they set out to make a new Anaconda movie that pays homage to the 1997 original while allowing them to dust off the no-budget amateur filmmaking techniques that they first honed as young movie buffs. On paper, this should be an echo of Tropic Thunder, serving as a self-aware satire of a video store staple while also allowing the audience to look back on the late 1990s with nostalgia and affection. See Jurassic World: Rebirth.

Unfortunately, the movie has no idea what to do with any of this and constantly works against its own premise. Is it a warm-hearted story about friendship? A juvenile slapstick throwaway for college frat boys? A low-budget action movie? A remake? A reboot? A spiritual successor? I feel like I've already asked more questions than the filmmakers, producers, or executives. The end result is a movie that is so messy, so tonally inconsistent, that I wonder how it ever made it into production. Someone at Sony should have stopped this before it ever went to cameras and demanded at least one more draft. It feels like a movie made by a dozen different creators. The writer and director of this film is Tom Gormican, whose previous directorial effort was the Nicolas Cage showcase The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. In 2024, he co-wrote the straight-to-streaming Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. To date, Gormican has only directed three films. One can't help but wonder if this one simply got away from him. 

The sins are near endless: one-dimensional characters, jokes that aren't funny, special effects that look cheap, wasted cameos, and cringiest of all, a series of "where are they now" text screens that harken back to movies like American Graffiti and deliver even more jokes that don't land. In one scene, a character receives some big news and literally looks at the camera and slowly falls down backward, straight out of a cartoon. Worst of all, the movie wastes very talented people. Jack Black is a titan of comedy, but here he's simply sleepwalking through the story. I also rarely comment on anyone's physical appearance, but the filmmakers have dyed his hair so dark that he looks nothing like himself and more like a late-period Orson Welles. Pau Rudd is another very funny actor, but he can't drag this movie to success by himself. Thandiwe Newton is a multiple-award winner who comes from genuinely important cinema but serves little purpose here other than "the girl." Steve Zahn is a delight in literally everything he's in, but he plays a buffoon in this movie to a degree that actually made me feel bad for him. Frankly, he's better than this. They all are. Almost nothing in this movie works. 

We now find ourselves in strange territory. We're so far past postmodernism that we're in a new era of what's being called "metamodernism" in which our culture is so self-aware that we've come full circle. We have a sequel to Scream called Scream, a sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer called I Know What You Did Last Summer, and in the case of this film, a pseudo-sequel-reboot-reimagining of Anaconda titled Anaconda. The movie frequently calls this self-awareness out, trying to have its cake and eat it too. While filming their low-budget movie in the jungle, our heroes (if you can call them that) discover that Sony is making its own reboot of Anaconda in the same area with the cast of the original movie. One of the Sony producers shrugs and says "nothing is new!" Indeed. And yet, rather than forge ahead with new ideas, here we are, beating the same horse (snake?) that died years ago. There was an opportunity to make a fun, self-aware reboot of Anaconda that reminds us what we enjoyed about the first movie almost 30 years ago. Unfortunately, this isn't it.