Anaconda (2025) – Review

Quick Thoughts:

1. The world needs more movies like Anaconda. It is silly, fun and features Jack Black (with a wild pig strapped on his back) running away from a gigantic snake.
2. I love that it exists. 
3. Daniela Melchior can lead an action franchise
4. I love whatever Steve Zahn is doing
5. Between Tropic Thunder, Jumanji (sequels), King Kong (2005) and Anaconda, Jack Black has good luck in jungles. 
6. Selton Mello has range. He’s wonderful in I’m Still Here, The Clown, and Anaconda. 
7. Ice Cube!

I’m not trying to be lazy here, but the plot of Anaconda isn’t important, so I won’t bother you with an overly-long recap of the movie. Just know that Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Thandiwe Newton and Steve Zahn play underachieving forty-somethings who travel to Brazil so they can film a reboot of the 1997 film Anaconda. I love that a failed actor (Rudd), a bored wedding film director (Black), a recently divorced lawyer (Newton), and a “Buffalo sober” maniac (Zahn) scrape a few thousand dollars together so they can film a creature feature about generational trauma (great gag). While in Brazil, they hire Santiago (Selton Mello), a squirrely snake handler, and have their boat hijacked by Ana (Daniela Melchoir), who pretends to be their captain. While filming their reboot (or rebootquel), they come across a comically large anaconda who pursues them through the Amazon rainforest.

The word “meta” has been used many times in interviews, and it makes sense considering that director Tom Gormican made a name for himself by directing the supremely meta film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Both Anaconda and TUWOMT could’ve been buried under the weight of their meta-ness, but Gormicon managed to find the correct tone for both films. Whether it’s capturing the bromance between Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal in TUWOMT or filming Jack Black sprinting through a jungle with a pig strapped on his back, he knows how to make high-concept ideas work. 

Unlike the 1997 film Anaconda, this iteration doesn’t feature any real or animatronic snakes, and instead relies on VFX. The artifice is noticeable, but when there’s a 5-minute sequence about Steve Zahn overcoming his shy bladder syndrome, the artifice doesn’t matter. The nice thing about Anaconda (2025) is that it’s not trying to be Avatar or Tron, and instead is totally happy rehashing gags about Rudd’s character losing a regular role on a network TV show (S.W.A.T.) There were constant rewrites, the production lost a major location (thanks to a storm), and the cast had to improv a lot, but it all comes together beautifully. It helps that the cast was all in, as Black joined without reading the script (he loves TUWOMT and Paul Rudd), Ice Cube gave his blessing (and cameos), and Paul Rudd has been everywhere saying the movie needs to be seen with an audience. 

Filmed over two(ish) months in Australia, the movie looks like it was filmed in two months. This isn’t a bad thing because a meta-comedy like Anaconda was never going to have a giant budget, and shooting in an actual rainforest for an extended period of time wasn’t financially feasible or necessary (it isn’t The Revenant). Production designer Steven Jones-Evans (Anyone But You, Hotel Mumbai) and his team built a boat that was filmed in Australian waters, but the rest of the production was shot inside Queensland soundstages. In an interview with MovieWeb, Black mentioned that the characters are shooting their Anaconda reboot for “funsies,” and the pure place they are making it from is what makes it unique. I think that’s what Black and Rudd were pursuing with this movie: they wanted to create an old-school comedy that makes audiences laugh. It’s the type of film audiences don’t see much of anymore, so it’s cool that Sony greenlit a mid-budgeted meta comedy about four ill-prepared people filming an Anaconda reboot. 

Final thoughts – Watch it in theaters and enjoy the insanity.