Anaconda (2025) Review: Great Concept, But Where Are the Laughs?
PLOT: After one of them unexpectedly acquires the remake rights to 1997’s Anaconda, four childhood friends—who once dreamed of becoming filmmakers—take out a bank loan and head to the Amazon to shoot a shoestring-budget reboot.
REVIEW: I must admit that the concept of this new version of Anaconda struck me as promising. The idea of four childhood friends, now in their late forties and early fifties, heading to the Amazon to shoot a remake of Anaconda of all things seemed just silly enough to be brilliant. While the premise may sound too ridiculous to be believed, there have been fan-directed, shoestring remakes that went viral—the most famous being the unauthorized Raiders of the Lost Ark remake made by a group of kids in the eighties, which later inspired a genuinely touching documentary. The fact that this group chooses to remake Anaconda, one of the silliest horror flicks of the nineties, really tickled me.
Too bad the movie isn’t funny at all.
Watching this in a theater proved to be a profoundly disappointing experience, as none of the jokes seemed to land (well, they did for a few people—one guy in my screening laughed hysterically at even the lamest gags). With a cast stacked with talented, funny people—including Paul Rudd and Jack Black—this should, by sheer accident alone, have generated a few solid belly laughs. Instead, it came off as desperately lame and unfunny.
Part of the problem may lie with director Tom Gormican, who consistently comes up with clever meta concepts but never quite pulls them off. This was true of his Nicolas Cage satire The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and it’s even more apparent here. Another issue is that I never fully bought into the central premise—that these four friends would actually go to the Amazon because they believe one of them somehow secured the rights to remake Anaconda. It’s a tough sell, and to make it work you’d need a cast that comes across as believably naïve. That’s not the case here.
Jack Black and Paul Rudd lead the ensemble, with Black playing a wedding videographer who always wanted to be a director, and Rudd a former childhood friend who’s become a middling Hollywood actor now reduced to extra work. Thandiwe Newton plays another friend, a newly divorced lawyer, while Steve Zahn is their ne’er-do-well cameraman. All four are tremendously talented, but they’re stranded by a plot that requires them to be believably dumb—and none of them come off that way.
Even so, I could have forgiven the shaky premise if the movie actually delivered laughs. Instead, it’s a tame PG-13 holiday farce that settles for mild, toothless humor and isn’t nearly as incisive about reboots—or even the original Anaconda—as it should be. Yes, there are a few easy-to-predict cameos, but they’re painfully obvious and already spoiled by the trailers.
Usually, Rudd’s presence alone is enough to sell me on a movie, but he’s given nothing to work with here. Black at least seems hell-bent on injecting energy into the film, even if his efforts aren’t enough to save it. Of the entire cast, the only performance that comes close to being genuinely funny is Selton Mello (who recently played a very different, serious role in Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here) as the snake handler the team hires, who happens to own his own pet anaconda.
The film goes even further off the rails once the mutant, man-eating anacondas show up, with Gormican awkwardly trying to juggle carnage and comedy. Ironically, the original 1997 Anaconda—which played everything straight—is at least ten times funnier than this intentionally comedic version.
In the end, this new Anaconda is a real bummer. Mainstream comedies are increasingly rare these days, and I miss seeing them on the big screen. The Naked Gun was a welcome throwback to an era when you could shut your brain off for ninety minutes and just share some laughs with an audience. I was hoping for the same here—but sadly, that’s not what I got.
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