Anaconda (2025)

There's a scene in the first ten minuts of Anaconda that actually gave me hopes. Jack Black plays a failed filmmaker who now "directs" wedding videos, and is depressed because he couldn't fulfill his dreams. On his birthday, his childhood friend played by Paul Rudd gifts him a video tape with a short homemade horror movie they shot on video while they were teens: it's cheap and shabby, but filled with charm and genuine good intentions.

The plot of this meta-remake of Anaconda is that the same group of friends, now adults with boring lives and mostly failed careers, decide to shoot a remake of Anaconda "guerrilla-style" in the jungle. It is a clever idea, but the end result feels like watching that amateur movie the characters shot when they were kids, but "for real", with middle-aged people and for 90 minutes. It is no longer charming, it is embarrassing.

Anaconda, the 1997 movie starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Jon Voight, became a cult classic due to its sincere B-movie ambitions, but in all honesty, it was not a very good source material to make a remake. Sony made a smart choice by turning the remake into a movie about people actually trying to make a remake of Anaconda... and finding a real giant anaconda. However, the execution is so failed (even by Sony Pictures' standards) that it somehow makes us appreciate the original more.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd make acceptable performances here, but the characters are so poorly written and make so many stupid decisions that they never feel like real people with real feelings, and sound more like characters from a Saturday Night Live sketch, only extended for 90 minutes. Worst of all, they barely have any chemistry between them or the other members of the party, Steve Zhan and Thandiwe Newton, despite the movie's heavy emphasis on their friendship as the pillar of the film, the one thing sustaining this succession of gags.

The director, Tom Gormican, previously directed The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a funny and wholesome movie about a drug cartel played by Pedro Pascal befriending Nicolas Cage, playing himself. That film was fun and light-hearted, nothing to write home about it, but it definitively worked as it knew how to balance the parody elements and pop-references with character construction and development so that we actually cared about them.

Anaconda tries the exact same things, but fails completely because the characters don't feel real and the gags aren't funny, which makes the film unenjoyable. While Anaconda is most of the time a spoof (with sometimes extremely long gags) other times it does try to make you care about the characters. But the mixture never works, and the tone is inconsistent: it is not particularly violent nor dirty, but it is clearly not a children's movie like Jumanji or Ghostbusters, so who's really this for?

Anaconda is not a parody of the monster genre, it's an excuse for not trying

While it was a smart idea at first, Anaconda also wastes the whole "film inside a film" premise: it serves for some (very few) clever meta-gags and some mild but fun blows to Sony and the Hollywood industry, but it ends up being a distraction to cover up the fact that they had no idea how to make a good and genuine monster movie. Yes, the giant snake does show up and eats people, and sometimes I wished I was watching a real remake of Anaconda, instead of this weird and unfunny excuse to capitalise on one of their worst IPs.

Anaconda (2025) is a failed experiment for Sony, and a very sad attempt to offer an alternative blockbuster to Avatar this holiday season. They try to walk a thin line between slapstick parody and the feel-good comedy, but miss on both sides: it is not funny, it is not touching, it is not smart, and it certainly is not a good monster movie if you're into those things. Watch the original, or don't: you won't miss much if you ignore Anaconda altogether.