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*/**** starring Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton written by Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten directed by Tom Gormican
by Walter Chaw The pitch must’ve sounded like: “Picture it! Tropic Thunder, but for Congo. A mashup of Jungle Cruise and Three Amigos! in the tradition of Spies Like Us!” Or, more likely, given how sloppy and unaware it is for a “meta” comedy, the entire pitch went: “We got Jack Black.” Would that they had a script, too. Would that it were actually as funny and imaginative as a sequel to Anaconda that acknowledges Anaconda is a movie promises instead of an awkward redux of Wild Hogs somehow: same aging cast and weird Latino panic, just more CGI snake and desperate improv–all of it adding up to something equally listless and dull. Is it a millennial nostalgia grab for the generation reared on Never Been Kissed and High Fidelity? Is it their turn already? Has this been going on for a while? Once it starts slipping, it’s astonishing to mark how quickly one’s cultural relevance circles the drain. Before Anaconda, I also hadn’t considered Jack Black and Paul Rudd to be in the last act of their respective careers, but here we are: Old men cashing a check drawn against shtick they’ve been milking for almost thirty years. This is the “me so solly” routine Krusty should have retired in the 1950s. There’s a layer of dust on it about an inch thick.
Cinephile Doug (Jack Black) has an All That Jazz poster on his wall but makes a living shooting wedding videos set to Paula Cole songs. His buddy Griff (Paul Rudd) is a starving actor nursing a fantasy of snagging the rights to the dormant Anaconda franchise when suddenly they fall into his lap, and he’s able to return to Bumfuck, Midwest, to tell Doug their ardent dream of updating these films is finally on the brink of coming true. I feel like more should be made of how this dream was formed when both Doug and Griff were just graduating with their bachelor’s degrees and looking forward to the wreckage of their lives, making it, you know, not great dream-fodder. Rather, it’s a flimsy plot point barely worked out. It’s insulting, sentimental pabulum, a patronizing pretext to get this thing into the jungle finally. After centring a full third of the runtime on aging comedians riffing on The Big Chill, suddenly someone decides to “take it down a notch” and wax rhapsodic about grabbing life by the tail and the pain of losing your dreams and now the joy of finding a second chance to, um, make Anaconda. It couldn’t be clearer, in other words, that they’re aware we’re almost a third of the way through this death march already and nowhere near the Amazon yet. Doug and Griff are joined on their mission to make the Best Movie Ever by sad, broken-down Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and alcoholic loser Kenny (Steve Zahn). Also, because Three Amigos!, there’s a criminal subplot involving heroic stowaway Ana (Daniela Melchior) and a largely faceless band of Amazonian banditos hot on her trail. The humour, as it were, comes from Team AARP reacting to a digital phantom and Jack Black doing a tepid impersonation of When Jack Black Was Fresh and Funny.
I did laugh when his friends think Doug is dead and strap a dead pig to his back so his corpse can be used as bait, which incidentally happens to be the wisest moment of auto-criticism in the whole damned mess. The extraordinary version of this film is Shinchirou Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead, in which a behind-the-scenes look at a no-budget, one-take zombie movie eventually becomes a moving tribute not only to the art of motion pictures but also to the preciousness of a collaborator who shares your vision. Filmmaking as a means of connection, not wish-fulfillment for mediocre men or the butt of a joke about modern mid-life crises. Black himself did this premise one better with Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, where movies had the power to reunite you with a younger, better iteration of yourself from way back when everything felt new and there was still some possibility left in the world. With its winking cameos, perfunctory narrative skeleton, and exhausted routines, Anaconda ’25 is rancid bait so moribund that no self-respecting anaconda would even consider eating it. There are better meals to be had. You’ve got better things to do.
