ANACONDA Review: Jack Black & Paul Rudd's Meta Take On A ClaSSSSic
A quartet of loveable losers strike out into the Amazon jungle in a foolhardy attempt to reboot a ‘90s creature feature classic in director Tom Gormican’s meta narrative comedy, Anaconda.
Ron (Paul Rudd) is an actor whose career isn’t turning out exactly the way he’d planned. Bouncing from bit part to bit part, he just can’t seem to gain a foothold as a working actor, and any out of work actor knows, the best way to get work is to make it yourself. So, when he returns to his suburban hometown to celebrate Doug’s (Jack Black) birthday, he brings the gift of hope. It’s time for the two of them to finally make the feature film they always dreamed of, and Ron has just the thing to get the wheels moving: Anaconda.
After explaining to Doug and their compatriots Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn) that he’d miraculously managed to prize the intellectual property rights for the 1997 JLo masterpiece from the original writer, Ron proposes that the four of them make their own Anaconda. After a bit of haggling and a few failed attempts to secure funding, the team says “f’ it” and heads off to South America with around $40,000 and a dream.
The resulting adventure is perilous, haphazard, ill-advised, and frankly stupid, but what dream ever looks logical at first? The deeper they dive into this production – a four-person gig with half of the team in front of the camera and the other half behind – the crazier things get until their film becomes a fight for survival in what is one of the most surprising comedies of the year. Also, one of the dumbest (and I mean that in the best possible way).
Gormican may not be a household name as a director, but after the critical and audience reaction to his 2023 gem, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, he has definitely set the table for a career that is worth watching. His take on Anaconda borrows a lot of the self-awareness from Unbearable Weight to craft a film that is less a sequel or a reboot and instead a commentary on the nature of nostalgia and the ability it has to coat the past in a rose-colored sheen that allows those who experience it to smile at memories that were perhaps less shiny than they remembered.
Black and Rudd are perfect foils to this end; both actors have built their careers on giant smiles and good-natured self-deprecation. This allows their characters to remain blissfully stupid in a charming sort of way that endears the audience to their repeated poor decisions. Newton’s take on a nerdy girl with a crush on the hottest guy in school is surprisingly convincing, even though she’s obviously a smokeshow herself. Zahn’s bumbling Kenny is probably the least interesting character, but the film manages to make him consequential through his ineptitude, thereby using the archetypes we most associate with the actors match the archetypes they each portray throughout the film.
As our quartet of heroes progress toward their goal, the film they are making becomes increasingly untenable. However, it is the way in which the story unravels that really gave me the biggest smile. There is nothing worse than watching a film and being ahead of it at every turn, and with Anaconda, that was almost never the case (until the very end when the studio felt it necessary to drop some big cameos in order to justify their budget). I was consistently surprised throughout the film, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than not knowing what’s going to happen next. Gormican’s script keeps the surprises coming at a breakneck pace, often layering laughs on top of laughs in a way that really hit the spot.
Anyone looking for a straight sequel or a po-faced reboot of the original Anaconda will be sorely disappointed. However, that’s not to say that this Anaconda is without its merits. It’s the rare reinvention that acknowledges the faults of its source material – Cajun Jon Voight, anyone? – and exploits them for the jokes they always were. There was no way that this film was ever going to match the melodramatic aura of the original, but Gormican did the next best thing, it surprised the hell out of me, and that’s exactly what I needed.
