07/01/26

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Christmas 2025 was a pretty fertile period for the cinema, with opportunities to catch plenty of decent offerings and, provided you picked carefully, there was not a turkey in sight. The first days of the New Year were likewise blessed, but eventually a viewer’s luck runs out. I still believe that Anaconda has a decent premise at its heart but, for a whole variety of reasons, it fails to make for satisfying viewing.

Ron Griffin (Paul Rudd) and Doug McCallister (Jack Black) both feel they have made wrong career moves. Ron always felt he was destined to be a movie star but, apart from a few fleeting cameos in various TV shows, he’s failed to make the big time. Doug maintains he is working as a film director – if you count wedding videos as movies – but he also fondly remembers his teenage years, when he and Ron recorded their own no-budget horror movies, making their own props and using their friends as actors. At Doug’s birthday get-together, Ron casually announces that he has managed to obtain the rights to Anaconda – the 1997 movie that was their favourite watch on VHS.

One drunken conversation later, and Ron has managed to persuade his old flame, Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and his hapless pal, Kenny (Steve Zahn), to flex their credit cards and accompany him to Brazil to shoot a reboot. But can they possibly persuade Doug to drop everything and join them as the film’s director? Hey, do giant reptiles live in the jungle? Well, they do of course and, in a brief pre-credit sequence, we’ve already witnessed what happens to people who stand around under trees muttering questions like, ‘What was that noise?’

To be fair, the set-up is decently handled by director Tom Gormican, who co-wrote the script with Kevin Etten. But once in Brazil, he seems unsure which direction to take with the resulting story and throws in a whole bunch of distractions. There’s a young local woman, Ana (Daniela Melchior), who is being pursued by armed men, though for quite a while we’re not entirely sure what they’re after her for. And why she would undertake to pretend to be the captain of a ship and ferry the film crew upriver is anybody’s guess.

Then there’s local snake ‘expert’ Carlos (Selton Mello) who actually owns a decent-sized pet snake and has somehow been brought onto the team as reptile-wrangler – but we’re not troubled with the details of how this came to be.

And of course there’s the titular giant snake, glimpsed only fleetingly at first, but becoming less convincing every time we set eyes on him.

The end result is that the comedy isn’t quite as sharp as it needs to be, while the action sequences are ponderous and unconvincing. Most damning of all, the scenes that (I think) are designed to be scary, really don’t generate enough tension to make me suspend my disbelief. The plot thickens when it turns out that there’s another, bigger crew in the vicinity who really are shooting an Anaconda reboot. This gives Gormican the chance to include a couple of celebrity cameos from Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, who, veteran movie fans may remember, starred in the original.

Look, I don’t want to be mean about this, because clearly it was never intended to be anything but a silly bungle in the jungle and I guess, in the end, that’s exactly what you get. And let’s face it, the original film isn’t remembered as being a cinematic masterpiece either. But no matter how slight the central premise, a film needs to convince – and sadly this one fails on that score.

2.8 stars

Philip Caveney