‘Anaconda’ Review: Paul Rudd and Jack Black Star in Lazy Meta-Sequel That Squeezes All the Fun Out of Self-Reflexive Premise

Honestly? "Anaconda" deserves better.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “All that Jazz.” “Anaconda.” The golden triangle. The holy trinity. The undisputed pinnacles of late 20th century Hollywood cinema. Each of these masterpieces invited the world to dream with its eyes open. Each of them has become synonymous with one of the three sacred elements that makes the movies so magical. (Imagination. Artistry. Snake.) And each of their posters are proudly framed in a row on the walls of the Sony lot where some — or in the case of Bob Fosse’s swan song, none — of their scenes were shot. 

Or so Tom Gormican’s sweet-natured but wastefully slipshod new take on “Anaconda” would have you believe. Maybe. Like almost everything in this soggy first draft of a comedy meta-sequel, the poster gag is so ambivalent that it’s hard to know if it’s meant to be a joke or not. 

I guess it’s funny that Luis Llosa’s cable TV classic — a silly “Jaws” riff about a giant CGI serpent who slurps down the members of a documentary crew as they drift along the Amazon — would be canonized alongside two of the most iconic American movies ever made, but Gormican’s film completely fails to contextualize the 1997 original on its own terms. Is it disreputable trash? Is it a winsome time capsule that’s made all the more endearing by its shitty effects and star-bound cast? Is it a faintly recognizable piece of IP that a desperate producer might thoughtlessly decide to revisit for seconds, like a water boa regurgitating its undigested food?

So far as this new “Anaconda” is concerned, the answer to all of those questions is both “yes” and “no” all at once. 

When talent-challenged background actor Ronald “Griff” Griffen Jr. (Paul Rudd) walks by the aforementioned one-sheets after being fired from a bit part in a TV medical drama, the “Anaconda” poster presumably catches his eye for a couple of different reasons, the most important two of which are braided together and relevant to the story at hand. The first is that it’s the kind of movie Griff and his friends loved to watch — and tried to make — when they were kids growing up in Buffalo. The second is that it’s also the kind of a movie whose rights might be semi-realistically affordable for a regular guy suffering a mid-life crisis. Guess who buys them. 

Griff doesn’t have any special affinity for “Anaconda” (his nostalgia is mostly limited to Jon Voight’s immortal performance as a knife-licking Paraguayan snake hunter so slimy that it feels like his prey already spat him back out), but that’s precisely what makes it the perfect subject for a satire about how modern Hollywood would rather trawl the collective unconscious for half-remembered ideas than come up with any of its own. Alas, this “Anaconda” is a lot better at illustrating the problem than it is at poking fun at it, even if Gormican — whose more coherent “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” also flubbed its self-reflexive concept — mostly resists the temptation to pretend that anyone does or should give a shit about the original.

Indeed, the sharpest aspect of his screenplay, co-written by Kevin Etten, is that it diagnoses its workaday characters with their own versions of the studio executive mindset. Similar to some of the people who greenlit this misshapen turd, the slowly extinguished potential of which still lingers in the air like a faint smell, Griff’s friends back East have all betrayed their childhood dreams in favor of accepting “B, or maybe even B+” lives because they’ve been conditioned to believe they didn’t have any other choice. 

Horror obsessive Doug McCallister (a relatively grounded Jack Black) aspired to be the next John Carpenter, only to settle for being the goriest wedding videographer in all of upstate New York. Burnout Kenny Trent (a wasted Steve Zahn, forced to squeeze an entire role out of a throwaway joke about being “Buffalo sober”) must have also had ambitions of some kind at one point, but I’m struggling to remember what they were. The same goes for Claire Simons, who’s played by Thandiwe Newton in a “since when does she do stuff like this?” performance that’s premised on the idea that one of the world’s most beautiful women might have spent her teenage years hanging out with the cast of “Saving Silverman.” Once upon a time she starred in Doug’s junior high creature feature “Squatch,” and now — bored and Buffalo rich from a recent divorce — Claire is happy to plunk down some of the $43,000 that he needs to shoot his masterpiece in the Amazon.

That Doug’s reimagining is called “The Anaconda” is one of the only winking in-jokes Gormican’s movie allows itself to make, which is bizarre for a comedy that’s ostensibly premised on the idea of restoring some heart to the Hollywood IP machine. Emphasis on “ostensibly.” Truth be told, “Anaconda” is determined to be about as little as possible, a bug that it tries to will into a feature with a running gag where Doug and Griff repeatedly strain for big ideas they can glom onto their script (which amounts to Black whispering the word “themes” while he squints into the distance). In lieu of a clear target or any meaningful point of view, Gormican fatally trains his attention on the madcap whimsy of making an independent movie with your friends — on the restorative joy of creating something for the love of the game and spending time with your favorite people. The problem there is that “Anaconda” is so shoddily made — and not in the lo-fi, sweded, endearingly amateurish way that Doug’s micro-budget sequel might be — that it completely undermines the same fun that it’s meant to celebrate. 

There are worse things than watching Black, Rudd, and Zahn play three gormless morons on a mid-life misadventure, but almost every scene and setpiece is constructed with a haphazardness that blunders away their charm. The dysfunction is on full display from the total “huh?” of a prologue, and it only gets worse when our heroes’ DIY creature feature is suddenly upended by the appearance of a real anaconda (and by “a real anaconda” I, of course, mean “a CGI behemoth so fake-looking it makes the snake from the original seem photorealistic by comparison”). 

The serpent’s introduction is so lackadaisical that it’s hard to tell if it’s supposed to be scary or funny (Gormican aims for both and settles for neither), and the movie is so uncertain about its own sense of humor that it never really commits to whether or not Doug sees the monster as a blessing in disguise. Which is similar to how the movie never really commits to Claire’s unspoken crush on Griff, or to the subplot about illegal gold-mining, or to basically anything else. It’s no wonder that the best thing about “Anaconda” is Selton Mello’s supporting performance as the snake wrangler our boys meet up with in Manaus, as the functionality of his role allows the overqualified Brazilian actor to stay on task in a way that proves impossible for his more prominent co-stars; it’s also inherently funny to see the dad from last year’s hyper-serious “I’m Still Here” make such an extreme pivot to this kind of silliness. 

“Anaconda” constricts its premise a little tighter as it moves along (if only because the absurdity ratchets up in a way that forces the film to adopt a clearer sense of itself), and there are some undeniably amusing bits of stupidity along the way. The post-modern stuff tends to fall flat, but, say, the sequence where Jack Black runs for his life with a regurgitated hog strapped to his back is hard to deny. And honestly, all I’ve ever asked of a movie — any movie — is that it make at least two jokes at Jon Voight’s expense, and on that score I have no choice but to acknowledge that Gormican’s meta-sequel delivers, if only just. Still, this self-reflexive Hollywood sendup is so slapdash and unsure of itself that it ultimately feels less like a bad in-joke than a case of a snake eating its own tail. 

Grade: C

Sony Pictures Releasing will release “Anaconda” in theaters on Christmas Day.

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