In my mind, remakes, when done well, are only truly good for three things: retconing a franchise whose sequels have gone too far; totally updating a classic for modern times; taking a film that maybe wasn’t so great the first time round and coming at it with fresh eyes. So when casting a critical eye over the daffy, new Anaconda remake, it’s actually quite inspiring that it ticks off at least two of those boxes.
To be fair, the original Anaconda – that saw the utterly strange mixing of Ice Cube, Jennifer Lopez, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson and a maniacally overacting Jon Voight go head to head with a giant snake – is something of a camp classic that still proves to be quite endearing despite being willfully ridiculous, but the mess of DTV sequels that slithered in its wake (including a crossover with Lake Placid) proved to be boring, cash-in, tripe. However, the 2025 version takes such an extreme new angle, it’s tough to call whether or not it’s utter genius or one of the worst concepts I’ve heard all year. It’s Anaconda, people – but this time it’s meta.
Childhood buddies Griff and Doug used to spend their youth making homemade movies in order to realise their dream of making it big in Hollywood, but as the years piled on, they’ve both found themselves in something of a rut. Griff has actually made the move to tinseltown, but life as a jobbing actor hasn’t been everything he was hoping it would be; but Doug remained in Buffalo, started a family, but still has dreams of making movies as he runs his wedding video business. However, when their old gang come together for Doug’s birthday, Griff has something of a shock surprise for his old buddy that might see them finally realise their childhood dreams – he’s somehow obtained the rights to remake the 1997 cult classic, Anaconda – a killer snake movie that they both loved. Roping in other friends Claire and Kenny, who also aided them during their youthful filmmaking endeavors, they take out a loan and head into the Amazon in order to film their reimagining guerilla style with an actual snake.
However, as you’d expect, the quartet soon face a stunningly varied amount of problems that soon not only test the boundaries of their relationships, but also puts their very lives in peril. Crazed snake handlers, reptile based accidents and illegal gold miners prove to be hazardous enough, but when a real monster anaconda shows up with a mind to swallow anyone it comes across whole, Doug and Griff’s indie venture soon means that they’re now living the movie they’re trying to film!
The meta jokes fly thick and fast as the wannabe filmmaker not only witness the power of a snake the length of a train, they also find that the legal arm of Sony Pictures has a fair amount of squeeze too.
Turning Anaconda into a meta comedy along the lines of Tropic Thunder isn’t the most awful idea despite the fact that the concept sounds vaguely like the sort of skit you’d find on a lesser episode of Saturday Night Live. If this crazy idea was to work, we’d have a whip smart comedy that mixed genuine thrills in with its laughs that utterly shed the skins of those rotten sequels and give the original a new lease of life. However – and probably unsurprisingly – Anaconda 2025 doesn’t really achieve this at all as it seems to be so genuinely pleased with the idea of genre swapping a killer snake franchise, it actually forgets to anything with it, other than have their stars keep banging on about how much they love the original movie and then run around screaming for most of the film. It’s a shame, because the bedrock of the movie is actually kind of sound as the backstory of both leads and their lifelong love of films feel nicely genuine thanks to a screening of their childhood, killer Sasquatch movie.
Maybe it’s me and maybe I respond to this backstory because I saw some of my own childhood in the dopey antics of Griff and Doug (although I can hardly claim to seeing the original Anaconda upwards of 30 times), but the early scenes of the comedy version actually had me fairly hooked much in the same way the filmmaking stuff in J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 did. Of course, this doesn’t end up lasting and once the movie shifts to the Amazon, Tom Gormican’s grasp of the film proves to be as slippery as a snake itself as he struggles to drag the film past the central “we tried to make Anaconda, now we’re in it” premise. It’s not that Gormican isn’t used to the whole meta thing as he was also responsible for Nicolas Cage going through a similar identity crisis in The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent; but while that movie attacked its strange plot with a sense of style, Anaconda thinks that simply going as dumb as humanly possible is the way to go and soon runs out of material disturbingly quickly.
There’s pros. Jack Black and Paul Rudd may not particularly stretch their comedic talents here and the occasional solid joke pushes through such as Steve Zahn’s character having to overcome his fussy pee shyness to urinate on a spider bite, or some utterly gratuitous cameos that’ll probably mean nothing to anyone born after the year 2000. However, it soon becomes obvious that the film hasn’t got the necessary skills to balance the comedy elements and the fact that we’re essentially watching a killer snake movie. The jokes are scattershot at best which means that the humorous bits underperform despite how hard the leads mug for the camera, but weirdly, the movie also skips on killer snake action, holding back on true scares or any graphic deaths and instead piles on the uninteresting sub-plots with reckless abandon. The thread concerning The Suicide Squad’s Daniela Melchior being tied in to illegal gold miners goes impressively nowhere and literally, despite in-film assertions that it makes the movie “about something”, just ends up feeling like unnecessary filler in a flick that just needs a giant snake to get by.
Also, while the snake itself gets to cause some big budget carnage when it actually shows up, the copious and obvious CGI weirdly feels way less effective than the practical and visual effects used back in 97. Also, for a “crazy” comedy, Anaconda also ends up being far less crazy that the actual “serious” film they’re supposed to be taking the piss out of. Sure, the scene where Black accidently is pronounced dead and is left out as bait with an entire pig gaffer taped to his body is pretty fun, but there’s nothing here even remotely as memorable as the snake yanking a falling Jonathan Hyde up like a yo-yo or the drawn out and awesome death afforded to Jon Voight’s leering villain.
While the aggressively odd premise held in its coils the promise of a truly, out-there horror/comedy, Anaconda instead finds itself barely in a better situation than the multitude of cheapjack sequels and the truly bizarre Chinese remake that’s wriggled out of the original movie. The cameos are fun and they get plenty of mileage from playing Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda – or Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby’s Got Back if you’re a perfectionist – but regardless if you’ve got buns hon, this Anaconda don’t want none.
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