Director: Tom Gormican
Starring: Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello
Certificate: 12A
Run Time: 99 mins

Anaconda is an action comedy meta reboot of the 1997 film starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black as Ronald and Doug, two childhood filmmaker friends who try to remake the original monster horror. The duo have fallen on hard times in recent years, with Ronald an extra who craves a leading role and Doug a wedding videographer who kids himself as having a ‘B, maybe B+’ career. When Ronald claims to have secured the rights to remake Anaconda, he convinces Doug and friends Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) to travel to the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil to realise their dreams. The film’s directed by Tom Gormican, who made the similarly self-aware The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent starring Nicolas Cage as a fictionalized version of himself, which I found very muddled.

While this meta reboot of Anacond has an excellent concept that could have freshly reinvigorated the series, it’s sadly a big disappointment. It’s not terrible – I laughed twice and snickered three or four times, but it’s nowhere near as good as it should be considering the talent involved. The script by Gormican and Kevin Etten is terrible, and while Rudd and Black (particularly the latter) deliver energetic performances, there’s no getting past the poor writing.

The film struggles to settle on a tone and isn’t funny, playful or scary enough. There’s no getting away from the fact the original Anaconda is an incredibly cheesy film, but the idea of having a self-aware meta-sequel is interesting because it could have playfully mocked it while offering thematic depth and terrifying thrills. Instead, what we’ve got is a film with long stretches between laughs, and it fails on the horror front too. The watered-down 12A rating is a mistake – the film would have really benefited catering to a more adult audience where you’d get some gruesome kills and raunchier jokes. The dreadful visual effects also really hinder the film’s verisimilitude and are frankly unforgivable in 2025.

While Jack Black is undoubtedly the highlight, Paul Rudd struggles with a poorly written character despite putting his all in. Thandiwe Newton’s Claire has zero substance and Steve Zahn has to resort to drug or toilet humour, which is a shame considering how talented an actor he is. The Suicide Squad‘s Daniela Melchior is completely wasted as Ana, a woman who claims to be going after illegal gold miners in a needless subplot and while it’s nice to see Selton Mello after his outstanding turn in I’m Still Here, he too is wasted as a poorly written snake handler.

It’s a real shame Anaconda isn’t the slam-dunk it could have been, considering the excellent concept and star-studded cast. While the result isn’t offensively bad, it’s nowhere near the standard it should be and the chief culprit is the shonky script that misjudges what the film’s tone should be. Anaconda could have been excellent if it had first-rate jokes while embracing the horror of such a deadly creature, but what we’ve got is a watered down, underpar and overly cynical, corporate-feeling film that’s designed for a mass audience.