Review: Anaconda (2025)

Reviewing this movie feels a little mean.  It's a perfectly fine film that accomplishes its modest goals and putting a full critical lens on it - which is entirely unnecessary yet here am I doing so - is a bit like being a bullying a small child.  So I will open by saying that this movie isn't bad, it just that it far too often settles for 'good enough' when it could have easily gone for good.

The movie follows a group of childhood friends as they decide to shoot an indie sequel/reimagining/remake of the 1997 so-bad-it's-good movie of the same name.  Griff (Paul Rudd) has acquired the rights to the film, and they set off to the Amazon with a dream and a hired snake owned by Santiago (Selton Mello) to fulfill a childhood dream of making movies together.

I do want to say that the friendship between Griff and Doug (Jack Black) is the best part of the movie.  While Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) complete the friend group, the Griff/Doug pair is the heart of the film.  And Black and Rudd play it well - more than the movie or the script really call for.  Rudd especially is giving his character all sorts of shading - pay attention to the scene where he springs the idea of remaking the movie - and is the easy best in show.

Sadly, they are really the only ones given anything worthwhile by the script.  Zahn has a few funny bits, but is mostly sidelined while Newton only serves as a love interest and is criminally underused given what she is capable of.  Every other character is a cypher (though Mello does get a few great bits as the snake-handler) and it sucks because all of them have the potential to be funny the movie just doesn't care about them.

When the movie is focused on their poor attempts at making their version of Anaconda, it is at its best.  However, it moves away from that far too quickly and becomes an almost-cliche when it does.  Not only that, but the movie starts to drag in these parts, which is deadly for a feature as short as this one.  A mid-movie twist exists that I don't think surprised anyone, and still the movie continues on past that resolution (with a few meta-jokes about movie production thrown in that do help)

That might be the biggest sin of the film:  It has too many tonal shifts while still trying to play to a wide audience that is expecting a much purer comedy.  I don't know if it should've cut these plotlines out or found a way to better integrate them; maybe they had to cobble them together after substantially trimming the original script and this was the best they could do.

Again, the movie is acceptable.  I think most people will laugh and enjoy it, but I also think by the middle of the year most will have forgotten the majority of the movie.

5 out of 10.