“J-Lo! Ice Cube! Eric Stoltz! Jon Voight… are you back for this one?”
After making the slight and forgettable 2014 flick That Awkward Moment, writer/director Tom Gormican seemingly found his muse in Nicolas Cage with his 2022 meta comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. While that is a film I would say I admire more than I enjoy, I was intrigued by their next project, which was going to see the two team up again for a fresh take on the Anaconda franchise, as it were.
1997’s Anaconda was released one month to the day before I turned 18, and I was 10 weeks away from graduating high school. It is, therefore, a touch disconcerting to see actors ten years my senior having fond childhood memories of a movie that even I was old enough to know was trash. However, none of that really matters in the long run, because this movie is going for something different and it succeeds wildly.
Now, you may not like it, or you may not find it hilarious, or you may be one of these psychopaths who hold the 1997 film in such high regard you refuse to see it sullied by intentional comedy. However, you can’t deny that in the day and age in which we live, where any film with even the mildest of cultural footprints can get rebooted, that Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten deserve credit for doing something new and original.
Cage is gone, replaced by Jack Black in the role of Doug McCallister, a failed filmmaker working in Buffalo as a wedding videographer, having long since given up on his dream of making genre films. On his birthday, he is surprised by his best childhood friend Griff (Paul Rudd), who has returned from Los Angeles, where he’s working as a struggling actor, to gift his friend the only existing VHS copy of a cheesy monster movie they made as teenagers.
He also informs Doug that through a fluke series of events, he owns the rights to the Anaconda franchise, and he wants to reboot it with their childhood friends Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn). And yes, the actors they cast are way too old to be having these sort of crises. They’re either supposed to be ten years younger than they are, or their age is also a joke, which the film is just a touch too sincere for me to believe, but I digress.
Deciding to live out their childhood dreams, they pool their money and head to Brazil where they’ve commandeered a boat, as well as procuring a giant snake from an eccentric snake handler named Santiago (Selton Mello). Masquerading as the boat’s captain is Ana (Daniela Melchior), a woman running from some kind of trouble, who agrees to take the crew with her down river, though she has her own agenda. Along the way, the friends manage to successfully capture a lot of footage for their film, but when an accident ends up costing them their title character, they suddenly find themselves in need of a new antagonist to finish their film.
Everyone in the cast is a pro, and they sell the hell out of the material. It’s fun to see the reunions in the film from Black and Rudd reuniting after playing Paul McCartney and John Lennon in Walk Hard, along with Black and Zahn reuniting from Saving Silverman—it’s interesting to note that this film is playing in multiplexes alongside another Neil Diamond-themed movie, Song Sung Blue. Newton hasn’t done a ton of comedy, but you throw a ridiculous midwestern mom wig on her and she more than holds her own. The true standout scene stealer, however, is Selton Mello as Santiago. I’ll take all of that you’ve got.
This Anaconda is not just taking the piss out of the original, that feels almost a bridge too far for Sony to allow their intellectual property to become a punching bag. There’s a sincerity to the effort that makes it difficult to hate, and the leads all bring an earnestness to the production that makes it clear this was never going to have true satirical bite to it. It’s a film aimed at people who love movies like Anaconda, and maybe made movies with their friends in high school. The movie’s not nostalgic for 1997’s Anaconda, it’s more aimed at people who might have nostalgia for that kind of movie.
When it comes to rebooting a franchise or doing a legacy sequel, the choices are either the studio does a straight remake of the original or we get something like this that’s attempting to do something different. I’ll take this version every time, because these things are going to go on and on forever, with no proper ending. Every single piece of intellectual property is going to be wrung dry from now until the end of time, though I never thought I’d live long enough to see the Anaconda franchise taken seriously. Thankfully now I don’t have to.
Header image via IMDb