'Anaconda' Is a Broad Action-Comedy Aimed at a Very Specific Audience

We are a Jewish family and, as such, celebrate Christmas in a properly Jewish way. We go to the movies and eat Chinese food, although this year it was Indian. We tried to choose a film the entire family might enjoy and zeroed in on Anaconda weeks ago. We love Jack Black, Jumanji was a family favorite, and we hoped this one might have a similar, broad appeal for a family with teenagers.

It did not. It is not a bad movie, nor is it a particularly good one. It is dumb and intermittently fun, but the ways in which it is fun are aimed squarely at Millennials and Gen Xers, or people who grew up watching the original Anaconda. It is not that knowledge of the original Anaconda is a prerequisite to understanding the 2025 version. It is not a complicated film. It is that the best gags and cameos are references to the original, and anticipating when those cameos will arrive is half the fun. If you do not know or care about a 28-year-old movie that there is no real reason for teenagers to watch in the 2020s, the best parts of Anaconda are likely to be lost on you.

And without those best parts, there is not a lot going for Anaconda. It is a midlife crisis comedy that is painfully short on scares, does not work particularly well as an action movie, and leans on comedy that assumes at least some affection for the original. That is to say, my wife and I found it amusing. The kids were mostly indifferent. I suspect most viewers under 30 would feel the same way.

Directed by Tom Gormican (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), who co-wrote it with Kevin Etten, Anaconda follows four friends who have hit various midlife rough patches. Doug (Jack Black) grew up wanting to be a filmmaker but is stuck in a dull job making wedding videos. Griffin (Paul Rudd) is a mostly failed actor who peaked with a few episodes in the third season of S.W.A.T.. Claire (Thandiwe Newton) is fresh off a divorce, and Kenny (Steve Zahn) is a recovering addict who is now “Buffalo sober,” meaning he only drinks beer and wine and not the hard stuff. Mostly. They reunite on Doug’s birthday to watch a movie they made as teenagers and are inspired to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget.

Unfortunately, midway through the shoot, they lose their anaconda. In trying to find a replacement, they stumble into a giant killer snake and get tangled up in a painfully generic subplot involving gold smugglers in Brazil.

The first hour mostly feels like setup for the third act action, and unfortunately, some of the best moments have already been spoiled by the trailers. And if you are wondering just how specifically calibrated Anaconda is for elder Millennials and Gen Xers, the final action sequence is set to Mötley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart.”

The script is not great. But the cast is game. Paul Rudd and Jack Black can do a lot with very little, and Steve Zahn has never met a scene he could not steal. The original Anaconda worked as trashy fun because Jennifer Lopez ran around with her shirt hanging off her shoulder, Ice Cube and Owen Wilson tossed off zingers, Jon Voight committed to a terrible accent, the comedy was mostly unintentional, and it functioned as a genuinely effective horror movie. The 2025 Anaconda does not. The foursome has far too much plot armor, the red shirts are aggressively red-shirted, and the snake is so cartoonish that it never registers as scary.

The cameos are fun, the meta commentary is amusing, and the cast has real chemistry, which is great if you like the cast and care about the original. For everyone else? Maybe wait for the next Jumanji movie next Christmas.