If nothing else, Anaconda earns a few points for originality. Taking a meta-comedy approach, Tom Gormican’s film follows a group of middle-aged friends as they embark on a quixotic quest to remake Luis Llosa’s 1997 original creature feature, beloved by many for its campy B-movie thrills and Jon Voight’s scenery-chewing performance. Right away, it’s a conceit that’s ripe for satirical possibilities, as the ongoing Hollywood obsession with making everything old feel new again is nothing if not maddeningly ouroboric in nature.
Jack Black and Paul Rudd put their everyman charm to work as lifelong buds Doug and Griff. Once set on making it big in Hollywood, they’ve fallen disappointingly short of their dreams, with Doug reduced to making wedding videos and Griff unsuccessfully chasing after bit roles on network TV shows. But when Griff unearths an old videotape of their teenage filmmaking opus, a homemade monster movie called The Quatch, their creative spark is ignited once more. Alongside fellow childhood friends and Quatch participants, Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn), they come up with a harebrained scheme to travel to the Amazon and shoot a remake of Anaconda, a film they were all obsessed with in their college days.
From here, Anaconda proceeds to celebrate the joys of DIY filmmaking. As in another Jack Black vehicle, Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, the malleability of intellectual property is a recurrent theme, with the script by Gormican and Kevin Etten touching on the ways in which we form intimate relationships with the entertainment that speaks to us.
The question of who really owns this content is one of Anaconda’s chief founts of humor, with the impetus for the group’s endeavour being Griff’s insistence that he bought the rights for the franchise from the author of an (in reality, nonexistent) book that the original film is based on. But this takes a gleefully screwy turn when the makeshift crew runs into a professional studio-sanctioned Anaconda remake production underway on the same stretch of the Amazon.
It’s disappointing, then, that this Anaconda, like Gormican’s prior The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, takes only the lightest of jabs at the Hollywood machine. The comedic plotting is busy and mostly routine, all the way until the red carpet is rolled out for cameos from a couple of the original’s stars. “We came here to make Anaconda. And now we’re in Anaconda!” Doug cries when the crew is finally thrust into danger, a line that pretty much sums up the film’s simplistic guiding principle. Thankfully, Anaconda is blessed with a charming cast that can still generate a chuckle out of even the hoariest of gags, like when Doug is stung by an insect in the jungle and an argument ensues over who will be pee on his wound to neutralize the poison.
Regrettably, the one star of Anaconda that gets the shortest shrift is the most important one: the snake. While the film features some monstrous attacks, they play out like something out of an especially uninspired SNL digital short. Sure, the original film and its increasingly lower-budgeted sequels may be funny, but they still pay respect to their creature-feature roots. If Gormican and company had more seriously considered why this particular piece of I.P. continues to resonate, the film may have potentially balanced the horror and comedy elements in a manner that would have satisfied both fans and newcomers to the series.
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