Film Review: ANACONDA (2025): Paul Rudd and Jack Black Have a Blast in a Bland Action Movie Reboot

Anaconda Review

Anaconda (2025) Film Review, a movie directed by Tom Gormican, written by Kevin Etten, Hans Bauer and Tom Gormican and starring Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, Ice Cube, Ione Skye, Rui Ricardo Diaz, John Billingsley, Sebastian Sero, Diego Arnary, Dan Silveira, Jarred Blakiston, Lisa Kay, Ron Smyck and Anna Francesca Armenia.

1997’s Anaconda was a fun rip-off of Jaws, but the new reboot, also called Anaconda, breaks the typical boundaries of a traditional remake with lukewarm results all around. Instead of trying to pass itself off as something new and unique, director Tom Gormican chooses to let viewers in on the joke from the first frame and it’s a device that doesn’t really work too well for the material at hand. Gormican’s Anaconda casts Jack Black and Paul Rudd as friends, Doug and Ronald. Black’s Doug is working for a company that makes wedding videos and Rudd’s Ronald is a bit part actor who fails in almost every job he takes on. When they decide to make a new spin-off movie of Anaconda, they gather a cast and crew and head out to the jungle.

Thandiwe Newton and Steve Zahn are in the key supporting roles here. They play Claire and Kenny, respectively. These two characters give into Doug and Ronald’s dream to make a new Anaconda movie even though they have a very minimal budget at their disposal. Selton Mello serves as a guy named Santiago who can provide a friendly Anaconda snake for the film shoot. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, Ronald kills the snake and they search for another one. Simultaneously, Daniela Melchior’s Ana is being pursued by a goon who’s hunting for gold which ups the ante…or something like that.

Gormican’s movie is initially a bit humorous. Black and Rudd have winning personalities that make them fun to watch. Black is coming off A Minecraft Movie so he’s the intended star although Rudd is a bit more interesting in the movie. There are many problems with this premise that is employed here. First of all, we find out that Ronald doesn’t have the rights to Anaconda like he says he does. We don’t find this information out right away, but when we do, it makes the whole premise feel a bit dumb. That holds true especially when considering the crew ends up putting themselves in danger when a real anaconda ends up on the loose. There’s also the matter that the movie presents itself as a movie within a movie at the end as it gets too clever for its own good. It’s hard to figure out, exactly, what this picture wants to do.

Black’s early scenes are better than the later ones. His character is a wedding video creator who attempts to use his own ideas to make the projects he works on. That’s really funny. Rudd’s character’s acting failures are also quite goofy to watch as he thinks this new film shoot will work wonders for his career. Rudd and Black eventually grow tiresome at some point in the middle of the picture as the supporting players, Newton and Zahn, occasionally steal some of their thunder. It’s great to see Newton working again and even Ione Skye pops up in a glorified cameo early on. These are old school actors and to see them together is a fun experience at certain moments within the film, for sure.

Then, Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez from the original 1997 movie gets involved in the action and that makes the whole thing feel like a bogus exercise in film-making that’s trying to be too clever and ends up being not clever enough to carry the weight of the film as a feature. That being said, there is an absurdly insane series of scenes towards the end where a pig is placed on a supposedly dead Doug. They try to use him as snake bait and Doug ends up actually being alive. It’s all cute, but the snake isn’t as scary as it was in the original and there’s never a sense that the stakes are really high here. That ultimately undermines the integrity of the film.

There are references to the 1997 movie that include nods to Jon Voight who was excellent as the villain in the old film. If this new reboot of Anaconda was to work, they needed a sharper angle to make it fly. Too much enjoyment of the new movie depends on your knowledge of the old one. New viewers may get lost trying to follow the parallels to the 1997 picture if they haven’t actually seen the 1997 film.

Black and Rudd have their fun moments, but Anaconda ends up being nothing more than a quick cash grab. There could have been a genuine reboot to this franchise that would have really worked. Instead, the crew of filmmakers in the new remake find a Sony Pictures crew making a reboot of Anaconda on their own. A female crew member states that they can’t come up with any new ideas anymore. She’s got that right on the money.

Rating: 5.5/10

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