It doesn’t take much for me to completely buy into your giant snake movie. Number one, show me the snake; number two, make the snake exciting; and number three, make the movie fun. Somehow, Mike P. Nelson’s Beware Boiúna comes up short on all three counts, delivering a turgid, overly serious eco-fable about a monster boa with very little action, and even less payoff.
Alli (Jessica Rothe) is an American do-gooder on a humanitarian medical trip deep into the Amazon. She’s just a trainee, but thankfully she has a team of medical professionals and a seasoned boat hands as they wind their way deep into the mysterious – and dangerous – jungle. When their boat breaks down leading to a tense showdown with a motley crew of no-gooders, one of the hoodlums winds up dead, sending Brennan (Logan Marshall-Green) and his buddies on a chase to track down the parties responsible.
As Alli’s boat races downriver in an attempt to escape, they make a risky turn, awakening Boiúna, a gargantuan serpent described by her roughneck buddy Lena (Kiana Madeira), as a protective spirit of the forest. Any time this part of the forest is harmed by the hands of man, Boiúna steps in and redresses the balance, often at the cost of several rapscallion lives. I’ll give you one guess as to who among these two crews is the culprit.
From there on out Beware Boiúna is chase after chase, with each group attempting to outwit the other while still outrunning the giant snake on their tails (sorry). What sounds like a riveting river adventure is bogged down with endless pontificating about the delicate state of the Amazon after decades of industrial incursion, and precious little crazy snake mayhem.
Never really serious enough to make the viewer think, while also never fun enough to give them a genuine thrill, Beware Boiúna exists in a mediocre purgatory, committing the worst sin a film can commit, it is boring. We get flashes of the creature as it races from one end of the frame to the other at an absurd speed, but it takes more than a few seconds of undulating scales to induce genuine terror. What quick glimpses we get of the snake head-on are so quick that they barely register, making me wonder why they bothered to make this a snake movie in the first place.
At a touch over a hundred minutes, Beware Boiúna stretches out further than it has any business doing. At least ten minutes of the film are top-down sequences of vast Amazonian jungle, and while it may be beautiful, a lot of it feels like it should be narrated by David Attenborough. If there were half as many overhead establishing shots, the film’s pace might feel a bit more urgent, but as it stands, even once Boiúna arrives on the scene, I spent most of the second half wondering where the snake even was, because it certainly wasn’t on screen, such a wasted opportunity.