Anaconda (dir. Tom Gormican)

by Jack Martin | Dec 28, 2025

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 99 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures

UK Release Date: 26 December 2025

WHO’S IN ANACONDA?

Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, Ione Skye, Ben Lawson

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Tom Gormican (director, writer), Kevin Etten (writer), Thiago Da Costa and Andrew Form (producers), David Fleming (composer), Nigel Bluck (cinematographer), Craig Alpert and Gregory Plotkin (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Two friends (Rudd and Black) find their remake of the film Anaconda going horribly wrong…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON ANACONDA?

Whether you’re a fan or think it’s utter balls, you have to admit that the 1997 B-movie cult classic Anaconda is pretty funny, even if it is unintentionally so. The movie carries such a ridiculous premise – a giant man-eating snake stalks victims like it’s a serpent Jason Voorhees – and features many laughably odd performances (Jon Voight’s campy Paraguayan accent being chief among them) on top of some pretty hokey effects, even for the mid-to-late 90s, that most viewers often end up chuckling more than actually being scared. Even the mostly direct-to-video sequels, one of them being a crossover with fellow B-movie cult classic Lake Placid, packed enough unintentional laughs to land in that category of so-bad-it’s-funny, all but transforming the Anaconda series into comedies rather than the horrors they were trying to be.

But when the opposite happens, as it does in director Tom Gormican’s new reboot, the effect is reversed. This version of Anaconda is by far the most outwardly comedic in the series, yet it’s not only the least funny (intentional or otherwise) but is such a wildly unenjoyable mess that it almost feels like a horror, in the sense that you’re watching something so uniformly bad that you’re actually frightened when you realise how much longer there is to go with this mess.

The film focuses on two friends: Doug (Jack Black), a wannabe filmmaker stuck in a dead-end job making wedding videos; and Griff (Paul Rudd), a struggling actor. Bonded by their love for amateur filmmaking and inspired by their mutual adoration for the original Anaconda, they decide to head to the Amazon Rainforest with their friends Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn) to fulfil a childhood dream and make their own version of the movie. But upon arrival, the group runs into a series of production woes, most notably the appearance of an actual giant anaconda that begins terrorising them and, in some cases, killing them off one by one.

There is, admittedly, a lot of potential with this idea. Doing a meta reboot of an existing horror series isn’t the most original concept in the world, especially when films like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Gremlins 2: The New Batch exist, but in this particular scenario, there is something interesting about seeing the titular creature go after people trying to capitalise on Hollywood IP in ways that at this point is largely nostalgia bait rather than out of genuine love for the franchise. However, there’s never a point in this movie where it feels like it knows what it’s meant to be satirising, or even what it’s doing as a whole because this script (by Gormican and Kevin Etten) is so unsure of itself that it keeps getting interrupted by plots that seem to have come direct from other movies. There’s a point where the film stops dead for a few minutes to become a thriller about illegal gold mining, and that’s after scenes where it doesn’t seem as though it knows that it’s either a Judd Apatow-produced comedy or a straightforward adventure movie like Romancing the Stone, all while also trying to be this meta commentary on the tropes and themes within the original Anaconda, as well as reboot-obsessed Hollywood as a whole.

One could liken the script to the titular anaconda, for it too seems to have been caught and knotted in its own coils, trying to do too much at once and not finding the right things to focus on with a consistent tone. It feels very much like you’re watching a first draft, one that hasn’t quite figured out how to blend everything together and desperately needs at least a few good redrafts to clean itself up. The writing here is so bad that characters will suddenly have grievances with each other just to create some forced conflict, while the dialogue is somehow more contrived than in the previous movies that took themselves far more seriously.

Even the performances feel off, with Black and Rudd fluctuating between natural geeky chemistry to awkwardly trying to out-mug one another (though Black can find solace in the fact that this he was at least in a slightly more tolerable movie this year than A Minecraft Movie), and then you’ll have weird turns by Zahn whose whole schtick revolves around him being a barely recovering alcoholic – and also, in the film’s most pointless sequence, working up the courage to pee on Black’s infected leg – and I’m Still Here’s Selton Mello as a very Dwight Schrute-like snake handler with a borderline fetishist connection with his pet serpent. Oh, and as for the barely-mentioned anaconda itself, it’s not even worth bringing up, as it’s about as legitimate a threat as a Care Bear is to an actual grizzly bear.

But perhaps the key problem with this supposed comedic reboot of Anaconda is that it is somehow far less funny than the actual movie it’s satirising. You keep waiting for there to be jokes and there never truly are, only awkward improv sessions where characters riff about chairs (peak comedy!), and even the bigger set-pieces which rely on you thinking that certain characters are no longer around don’t work because not only were they and their punchlines a big part of the film’s marketing, but also that you refuse to believe that characters like these are stupid enough to actually think that particular people are properly dead.

When you get more laughs from watching the (sort-of) serious 1997 original instead of the comedy version, you know that you’ve completely missed the mark, and Anaconda is a shockingly bad mess that screws up its own potential with a complete and utter lack of coherence in its own narrative voice.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Anaconda is a dreadful meta reboot of the horror franchise that comes with interesting ideas but no idea how to execute any of them, instead getting tangled in its own coil of competing plots and tones that the terrible script cannot seem bothered to sort out to fix its own messy narrative.