3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Anaconda

2025, Tom Gormican (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) -- download

I love the premise of this movie. Adult fans of the original 1997 Anaconda movie (starring J Lo, Eric Stoltz, Ice Cube and Jon Voight) are living unfulfilled lives leeching off the fond memories of the home movies they made in their adolescent years. Failing actor Griff decides they need to all get back together and shoot their own spiritual successor to the '97 movie, telling his friends he has attained the rights. They go to the Amazon to make their low low low low budget movie only to encounter a real anaconda snake, thus giving us a meta reboot/sequel.

I recall loving the first movie, a cheesy self-aware monster movie. I don't recall seeing the three proper sequels, nor the crossover with Lake Placid. I definitely did not see the Chinese remake. This one interested me peripherally because I love meta stuff and the cast was solid. 

Alas...

Wasted talent. So much wasted talent. 

Yeah, so Griff (Paul Rudd, Antman) just got fired from the TV show he was guest starring in, having put waaay too much of himself into the role -- essentially the opening scenes of Wonder Man (stillll not writing about TV but that show was fucking great) -- and ends up back home in Small Town Somewhere, where everyone has shitty normal lives. Doug McAllister (Jack Black, King Kong) makes "wedding videos" while constantly trying to insert his filmatic flair into people's personal memories. His friend Kenny (Steve Zahn, Sahara) is a loser. Their friend Claire (Thandiwe Newton, Westworld) is a lawyer who just got divorced. And then Griff shows back up, desperate to reignite.... something, gathering them all together to look at the cheesey, ham-fisted home-movie action flicks they shot when they were kids.

The whole problem with this opening act is that only Zahn pulls off being small town -- everyone else are just too larger than life actors to be believable as the small-town schmoes. I mean, they are all more than capable actors able to play those roles, but this movie doesn't allow them. I mean, c'mon, who is going to believe Thandiwe Newton as a sadsack with a sad life, even if you ignore her entirely flat American accent. And Jack Black as the (mostly) Straight Guy?

So, Griff convinces them that he has the rights to Anaconda the original movie and convinces them to put together whatever money they all have and go to the Amazon to film a re-make, re-boot, sequel... something. They even arrange a proper "snake wrangler"... well, proper is a strong word but he has a snake. That is, until a startled Griff kills it. And it should be said that there a B-plot about Ana (Daniela Melchior, Road House), a local Brazilian woman on the run from some tough guys with guns who has convinced them she is their riverboat captain, AND an actual anaconda of monstrous proportions is eating said tough guys.

And, there is not much else worth recounting. The rest is a cheesey, ham-fisted attempt at comedy mixed up with fish-out-of-water mixed up with actual horror. There are some moments where the selling points of the script are there, for example, when this crew runs across an actual crew filming an actual reboot to Anaconda but they, in turn, are eaten by Big Snake. And Ice Cube shows up to mirror his original role while playing himself. All fine & dandy ideas, as if the original script of the movie was full of serviceable ideas which were just ... wasted. Not enough precision to make it funny, not enough skill to juxtapose actual horror with insightful silliness. And only one, truly, absolutely ludicrous scene involving Jack Black with a "dead" pig strapped to his head, which had me giggling uncontrollably and then... sigh, back to bored. It was the sheer stupidity of that scene that had me laughing. And not much else.