There’s a premise buried inside Anaconda that is genuinely charming: a couple of middle-aged guys, dissatisfied with where life has taken them, decide to do something wildly unprecedented — head deep into the Amazon and remake their favorite movie from childhood. It’s the kind of ridiculous, sweet idea that makes you root for a film before it even gets going. And for a while, that goodwill carries things along. But the movie ultimately has one job: be fun, be funny. And it mostly fails to deliver on that promise.
The film’s core conceit is meta in the best way. Doug (Jack Black), who channels his artistic instincts through hilariously elaborate wedding videos, and Griff (Paul Rudd), a struggling actor still booking bit TV parts despite his self-serious commitment to his craft, are childhood best friends who love the 1997 Anaconda so much they want to redo it. Their midlife crisis becomes their catalyst, and there’s something genuinely relatable about that — people who put their dreams on a shelf for decades suddenly deciding to reach for them, consequences be damned. The emotional engine works.
The problem is the comedy. The jokes, more often than not, simply don’t land. The playfulness of this self-referential structure gives the movie a zany energy off the top that it ultimately can’t sustain. Lumbered with joke-light dialogue and low-stakes action, the film too frequently mistakes the idea of a joke for the actual punchline. There are flashes — a physical gag here, a self-aware wink there — but not nearly enough to sustain 99 minutes.
No Man’s Land
You get the sense that director Tom Gormican is reaching for something in the vein of Jurassic Park — a creature-feature with spectacle, momentum, and a cast of relatable people thrown into genuine danger, just with lighter stakes and a comedic spin. It’s an understandable ambition. But the film never generates that Spielbergian tension, and without it, the comedic release has nothing to push against. The thrills aren’t thrilling enough to make the laughs feel earned, and the laughs aren’t frequent enough to compensate for the absence of thrills. It ends up caught between the two.
The Ensemble
The ensemble chemistry is also a problem. Doug and Griff feel like they belong together, but their dynamic with the rest of the group falls flat. Steve Zahn, as their cinematographer, is stuck playing a clueless goofball, which provides maybe a laugh or two. And Thandiwe Newton goes criminally to waste as the woman Griff had a crush on — she’s a divorced lawyer, and that’s the extent of her personality. It’s a shame, because both actors are capable of far more.
Then there’s the gold digger subplot, centered around the boat’s shady captain and the illegal miners lurking in the jungle. The secondary storyline involving gold poachers is woven into the main narrative in a way that feels more distracting than anything else. The captain, in particular, is a disappointingly thin villain — all menace, no texture, and not particularly effective at either.
The Third Act
The third act arrives in a rush. After spending a leisurely hour setting things up, the climax barrels through its action beats with surprising haste, as if the film suddenly remembered it needed to end. It doesn’t feel earned. And the celebrity cameo near the close? Wholly unnecessary — a moment that reads more like a contractual favor than a genuine creative choice, landing with a thud where it presumably hoped to land with a wink.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment is the ending itself. The premise might be ripe for a raucous action-comedy, but this meta reboot can’t detach its jaws wide enough to swallow so many conflicting tones. Going in, one might have hoped that the film’s success would open the door to something grander, perhaps even a legitimate Anaconda reboot with real stakes. That optimism goes unrewarded. The conclusion is modest, a little anticlimactic, and leaves you feeling like the film didn’t quite believe in itself enough to go all the way.
Tom Gormican’s Anaconda isn’t a disaster, nor is it the sharp, self-aware reinvention it wants to be. It has charm, a handful of strong performances, and the occasional flash of the sillier, smarter film buried inside. There’s a version of this movie — sharper, meaner, more committed — that could have been something special. This version is fine. Amiable. Forgettable. A midlife crisis movie that, fittingly, doesn’t quite have the courage of its own convictions.