Hollywood studios have spent the last two decades in an arms race to see who can best cash in on their intellectual property, and the box office points to one clear loser: Sony. Their only bankable franchise is Spider-Man, and they share custody with Marvel to reap the benefits of the MCU. Their desperation is such that the studio acquired the “28 … Later” series off the market and attempted to develop new works based on the vampire saga.
Typically, a primer on business and backroom deals is irrelevant to evaluating the critical value of a film. But Sony’s attempt to revive “Anaconda” in 2025 elevates the subtext of commerce to be part of the content itself. It’s the kind of shameless, go-for-broke move that a studio would only attempt at the absolute nadir of their creative capabilities. The gambit would be admirable if it worked in any capacity.
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The limp premise of “Anaconda” hangs on the reunion of four friends once enamored of filmmaking who have all entered various states of midlife and mid-career disillusionment. In an act of desperation that mirrors the film’s own reason for existence, Paul Rudd’s flailing screen actor, Griff, secures what he thinks are the rights to the killer snake property. With childhood chums in tow that include Jack Black’s Doug, Steve Zahn’s Kenny, and Thandiwe Newton’s Claire, they set off for the Amazon jungle for a renegade indie production meant to reignite their former passion for the form.
Co-writer/director Tom Gormican’s take on the “Anaconda” franchise, if one can even call it that, is … well, even the characters can’t decide as they try to explain the project within the film. Maybe it’s a reboot. Perhaps it’s a reimagining. Or it could even be a spiritual sequel. One thing is for certain: it’s an unfunny, uninspired mess. Watching Sony’s quarterly earnings call would be more entertaining and just as revealing about the state of their business.
A more apt slithering reptile to give its name to Gormican and Kevin Etten’s script would be the Ouroboros, the mythical snake that eats its own tail. “Anaconda” devours itself with self-reflexive gags about its own flimsy construction as the quartet sets out on a doomed quest to do whatever it is they intend to do with the IP. Each bit of industry commentary, from determining the metaphor of the creature to dubbing it “social horror,” gets more obvious and less amusing. It makes recent meta-movies like “The Fall Guy” or even “Deadpool & Wolverine” look like Fellini’s “8 ½” by comparison.
There is a way to make a movie like this successful, and Sony would know since they bankrolled it. Lord and Miller’s “Jump Street” films managed to thread the needle between fan service and satire because they actually made a good movie in between making jokes at their own expense. “Anaconda” seems to only exist as a punchline in the hopes that maybe one might the film stick as an actual franchise worth spawning sequels. By the end, Sony seems to hold their viewers in active contempt as the bar for humor sinks to subterranean levels. (Any lower and they’d be finding a way to shoehorn “Anaconda” into the “Men in Black” series like they wanted to with “Jump Street.”)
It’s genuinely baffling the number of fronts on which “Anaconda” faceplants. Just putting a camera in front of the ever-energetic Rudd and Black should be enough to generate a comic spark, but the film’s limp script locks them into having to play inane story beats that are beneath their talents. The PG-13 rating does them no favors because the comedy lives in a nether-region between sanitized family fare and bawdy adult material.
The creature feature elements of this new “Anaconda” flop in a similar fashion. Gormican withholds the giant CGI snake that slithers and swims as if it were a skinnier Jaws, but it fails to generate suspense or scares. He telegraphs every jump moment so obviously that it becomes possible to set a watch to when they’ll arrive. The action sequences are at least competently crafted and coherent to follow, which is not something all films in the genre can say.
But each time a big set piece arrives, it only underscores the bigger problem of “Anaconda” and other Hollywood ventures of its ilk. These films are so overstuffed to the point that, rather than offering everything to everyone, they amount to nothing. As studios make fewer movies, each one has to provide multiple genres’ worth of entertainment to expand the marketability across every audience quadrant. Let this film with no bite serve as rock bottom for the IP era. This anaconda don’t want none…if the “none” in question is enjoyment. [D-]
“Anaconda” opens in theaters on Thursday, December 25.
