Intensity: 🩸1/2 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Tom Gormican
Written by Tom Gormican, Kevin Etten, and Hans Bauer
In a meta reboot brimming with promise, the re-imagined Anaconda (2025) lost the plot early and often. The cast? Star packed. The trailer? Very funny. The concept? Surprisingly original, but the story meanders and squanders the core ideas. The snake? We didn’t see enough of it, and it has been done better in movies with much smaller budgets. Was it scary? Not in the slightest. This was a lost opportunity.
When I saw the trailer last fall, I was jazzed for this movie. Paul Rudd and Jack Black play middle aged pals who dreamed of being big time horror movie makers, but bad luck, and lack of talent stranded them in unsatifying careers. They team up in a nostalgic attempt to remake the classic 90’s B-movie Anaconda, on a shoestring budget and a cast of only their pals. With the level of talent in this movie, and the available budget from Sony, this should have been a blast.
It had its moments. The peaks of this moment are very funny. Unfortunately, the trailer gave away the best gags, and it failed to capitalize on the actual premise. They are pretending to do Anaconda, and then become actually pursued by a giant anaconda. But they stop at the water’s edge. It is as if it is a three story arc that forgot about the second arc. That’s the part where you establish the threat of the actual snake. The story spends a long time establishing the indie movie within the movie, but once it’s time for an anaconda, it loses focus, and then charges into an explosion filled conclusion.
If you recall the 1997 cult classic, the titular snake attacked and ate six characters, and put J-Lo and Ice Cube in great peril. The anaconda was a mix of physical props and early CGI, and it really worked, even if the effects were a little mid. The plot was pure monster movie cliche but we forgave it because of how much fun it was, and how scary the snake was. This time we get a lot of Jack and Paul, and not a lot of snake.
The Cast of Anaconda (2025)
- Jack Black plays Doug McCallister, a filmmaker reduced to producing wedding videos, though he dreams of making a horror epic.
- Paul Rudd plays Ronald “Griff” Griffin Jr., a struggling actor in Hollywood who overthinks his performances, and keeps getting fired from the jobs he does manage to land.
- Steve Zahn plays Kenny Trent, Doug’s addict loser buddy who works both as cameraman and supporting actor in Doug’s movies.
- Thandiwe Newton plays Claire Simmons, Dough and Ronald’s childhood friend, who is now a dissatisfied lawyer. Ronald and Doug convince her to play the co-lead in their Anaconda reboot.
- Daniela Melchior plays Ana Lameida, a renegade adventurer on the run in the Amazon basin.
- Selton Mello plays Santiago, the eccentric snake wrangler for the movie.
- Ice Cube plays himself, a survivor from the 1997 movie.
- Ione Skye plays Malie, Doug’s wife.
- Rui Ricardo Diaz plays Joao, who is in hot pursuit of Ana.
A Synopsis of Anaconda (2025)
We begin our story in the Amazon. Ana and her partner are risking their lives on a mission to find a boat that will get them to safety along the mighty river. Ana heads out on her motorbike, with Joao and his team in pursuit through the jungle. When Ana finds a boat, a giant anaconda leaps out of the water and eats one of Joao’s team, letting Ana get away up the river. Big snake, established.
Meanwhile, back in Buffalo, New York, Doug McCallister’s life is not going according to plan. He is directing films, but not the types that he wished he was making. He shoots wedding announcements and ceremonies. Doug is destined to inherit the business from his boss, who insists that Dough focus on making the couples happy and not inject his horror movie notions into the productions. It might not be everything he wanted, but it will guarantee him a B to B+ lifestyle. Good enough, perhaps?
At his surprise birthday party, Doug is reunited with his childhood mates, Griff, Claire, and Kenny. Their lives haven’t panned out the way they wanted either. Griff isn’t a very good actor, and his Hollywood track record proves it. Kenny is a drunk and an addict, but claims that he’s “Buffalo Sober”… which means he’s still using. Claire is a lawyer, but it is an unfulfilling life. Times were so much better when they were in high school having fun making monster movies in the back yard.
The Movie within the Movie
Griff announces that he’s got a big surprise. He has acquired the filming rights for the 1997 film Anaconda. Don’t ask how, but it’s a minor miracle. He says that the group should do a low-budget indie version of Anaconda, and shoot it live in the Amazon, guerilla-style. Doug holds out, initially, but the lure is too much. He’s in. The crew doesn’t secure much of a loan, so they limit their expectations. They pack their bags and head for Brazil.
The production’s saving grace is that Kenny managed to secure an eccentric snake wrangler, Santiago, who own’s a tame constrictor snake, Heitor. No need for fancy special effects, they’ll use the real thing. They also have the use of a comforable river boat that they can use for the shoot, and they have the whole Amazon to use as their backdrop. Ana, still on the run from Joao, sneaks onto their production boat, and claims to be the boat owner’s daughter, and will take them up river, but they have to leave immediately.
The shoot initially goes “well”, with Griff, Claire, and Kenny mugging for the camera, speaking the stiff dialogue and having a smashing time in the process. Things go awry, however, when Griff panics when acting with Heitor, resulting in the big snake getting tossed overboard into the boat propellor. No more snake. Santiago and Griff go out later that evening to find a new snake in the swampy side reaches of the river. Griff panics, and the giant anaconda that has been following Ana ends up hunting Santiago.
When the crew goes looking for Santiago, they find an encampment, probably belonging to illegal and violent gold miners. They climb into a van, when a regurgitated Santiago gets barfed on to the windshield. To make matters worse, a motorcycle gang with submachine guns has arrived. The plans have changed, the crew making an Anaconda reboot is now actually being pursued by a giant snake… and bandits. Irony!
Evaluation of Anaconda
From that synopsis, it had the skeleton of a pretty good story. Unfortunately, once the actual movie within a movie begins, the story threads all fall apart. The injection of Ana and her pursuers is a needless distraction. You know it is, because that story abruptly ends unceremoniously, and it really didn’t do much to move the story along. It was a side-quest, and poorly constructed one at that. There is also a meta sidebar where it turns out that Griff really didn’t have the rights to the Anaconda film, and they realize this when they encounter a big SONY production team on the river doing the official reboot.
This allows for some pyrotechnics at the end of the film, and a cameo for Ice Cube, but this felt like more spaghetti on the wall production thoughts, and though it made for a few fun gags, it didn’t help to advance what was needed, which is to put the focus on the giant snake. That’s what the original film did so well. True, the 1997 film was packed with recognizable movie stars, as this one is, but it featured the anaconda significantly.
MINOR SPOILERS: Hop ahead if you don’t want this criticism to spoil the movie
This is largely a Jack Black and Paul Rudd movie, and they play very much to type. Jack is a schlubby underachiever who has been given a too-good-to-be-true break. Paul is a low-key, sweet, and goofy leading man. These are actors who are nearly incapable of disappearing into their roles, and that is very much true here. There is a ton of plot armor for these two, even though there is a fantastic scene where Doug is assumed to be eaten by the snake.
If you are a fan of either of these actors, you probably will enjoy this movie at least a little bit. You have seen these guys in roles just like this before.
Steve Zahn once again plays an awkward loser, and Thandi Newton seems oddly out of place here. They should have been snake food, but they get spared. In fact, the only notable characters to get consumed are Ana and Santiago. The original anaconda was powerful and the movie reveled in its monster. It ate Danny Trejo, Vincent Castellanos, Kari Wuher, Jonathan Hyde, Owen Wilson, and Jon Voight. Cool! In this movie, the anaconda is an afterhought. This is not a movie about the snake. It’s a movie about making a movie about the snake, and there is a big difference.
END OF SPOILERS: YOU CAN READ NOW
There are some genuinely funny bits, but they are almost all in the trailer. There is a bit of nostalgia bait as well, but the memberberries are only useful for so long. Had either of the major side-plots been well integrated into the primary storyline, this could have been more fulfilling. I hate to suggest it, but if this film had integrated in some shaky-cam first person action, it would have been more convincing. They wouldn’t have even needed to use a lot of it.
The premise that the crew realized that they were now part of an Anaconda movie, but largely stopped their cameras was anethema to what they were doing down in the Amazon. You only need to think about another Jack Black similar situation with Peter Jackon’s King Kong. Keep the film rolling! This is gold! Instead, the entire MacGuffin that brought these people to the location was busted. At the movie’s conclusion, there is another big cameo, which suggests that the film that this team made was a big hit. The problem is, they lost ALL the good material of the real snake.
In truth, the anaconda itself is barely felt. This was a busted bro-mance story, with some snake on the side. Here’s a suggestion: Reboot THIS movie. Try again. You could even bring back the same cast. Add some friends of Rudd and Black who would be willing sacrifices to the snake god, and make the anaconda scary again. Hell, you could even keep most of Act I. Just re-shoot Acts II and III.
Anaconda is rated PG-13 for violence/action, strong language, some drug use and suggestive references. This movie isn’t going to scare many kids. The jokes will probably go over their heads because a lot of the humor is about adult mid-life crises moments, and failed expectations. Given that the first Anaconda was also PG-13, this could have pushed the envelope more. This was a widely released big studio film, and is available streaming on most major services.