Anaconda (2025)

Remaking Anaconda as a comedy about remaking Anaconda is an idea so brilliantly terrible, or terribly brilliant, it might have crossed the mind of The Studio’s increasingly desperate Matt Remick. And in another version of the movie multiverse it could — maybe — have worked.

Director Tom Gormican and co-writer Kevin Etten made 2022’s exuberantly meta The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, so they must have seemed like a smart choice, and old hands Paul Rudd and Jack Black can wring laughs from just about anything. But this risky reboot presupposes quite a lot. There have been five Anaconda flicks since the good-bad original, but only one (2004’s Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid) has troubled a cinema screen, and it’s unlikely any of them are anyone’s actual favourite movie. “Who cares about IP?” asks failed actor Griff (Rudd). “Literally everybody,” answers frustrated wedding videographer Doug (Black). Yet outside of the Sony boardroom, is that really true?

Even the characters, who claim to have watched J.Lo’s breakthrough film a punishing 30 times, don’t seem especially well-versed in its lore. No matter, because as they head up river and into danger, what emerges is closer to Tropic Thunder, albeit lumbered with joke-light dialogue, low-stakes action and a rubbish CGI snake. “We came out here to make Anaconda,” says Doug, “and now we’re in it!” They certainly are.

With the male leads riffing on their familiar screen personas — Thandiwe Newton, as one of their friends, is given embarrassingly little to do — and gorgeous (Australian) locations, it all glides along smoothly. But the original had a certain cheesy, take-no-prisoners charm that’s missing here, and the endless callbacks and cameos feel less like fan service than self-satisfaction. Depressingly, the most inventive scenes take place early on, in a cheapo creature-feature our heroes shot as kids. A film within a film about a film — how’s that for meta?