A Horror of a Comedy

Is Anaconda the first Hollywood movie to include an on-camera discussion of IP? The heroes of this meta-reboot of the campy ’90s horror movie are wannabe filmmakers who acquire the remake rights to Anaconda because, as one character puts it, “that’s all big movies are” now.

The moment is meant as a meta-joke, of course. We’re only watching this new Jack Black and Paul Rudd buddy movie because someone in Hollywood thought the Anaconda IP was strong enough to pull viewers into theaters to watch it. But that line plays more like tragedy than comedy, since it’s a tacit acknowledgement that basically the only way Hollywood will make a comedy these days (or any genre, for that matter) is by awkwardly shoehorning some IP into it.

It’s not enough to make a movie about funny people with recognizable desires and relatable problems anymore. You’ve got to find a way for those people to solve those problems by fighting a giant CGI snake while making desperate quips about how the snake is actually a metaphor for something.

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Those snake-fighting scenes are all the more disappointing because Anaconda’s earlier ones before the jungle antics (and IP exploitation) are pretty promising. They introduce a cast of friends from Buffalo led by Doug (Black), who grew up wanting to become a major movie director but eventually settled for a humble life as a husband, father, and wedding videographer who injects all sorts of inappropriate movie references into his work over the objections of his clients. Doug’s boss tries to convince him to accept his fate by insisting “This is a B, maybe even a B+ life!”

If only Anaconda were a B, maybe even a B+ movie. Unfortunately, Doug’s childhood bestie, a struggling Hollywood actor named Griff (Rudd), returns home for Doug’s surprise birthday party with a present: The recently acquired rights to the underlying Japanese novel that inspired 1997’s Anaconda, which starred Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube as the members of a film crew who travel to the Amazon to make a documentary about an indigenous tribe and instead wind up targeted by the local wildlife.

Griff believes that with the Anaconda rights and less than $50,000 they and their two other childhood buddies — drug-addled Kenny (Steve Zahn) and recently divorced Claire (Thandiwe Newton) — can finally make their cinematic dreams come true. The quartet heads to Brazil where they hook up with an eccentric snake wrangler (I’m Still Here’s Selton Mello) — and accidentally get mixed up with a beautiful young woman (The Suicide Squad’s Daniela Melchior) on the run from some tough dudes who want control of a gold mine.

Why, if the entire budget of your film is less than $50,000 and your cast and crew consists entirely of five people, you would go all the way from Upstate New York to the Amazon to shoot your Anaconda remake is never explained. But pretty much nothing in the film from the moment Black, Rudd, and company touch down in Brazil makes any sense. The audience is simply expected to go along with the ludicrous series of events that follows, which does indeed include the crew encountering an actual oversized snake. (Apparently Anaconda was more accurate than any of us ever realized.)

The notion of a bunch of losers coping with an intense midlife crisis through moviemaking is an absolutely valid one for a comeddy. Unfortunately, it would require a script that spends more than just its first couple of minutes considering its characters as human beings. Once Griff, Doug, and their colleagues get to South America, all of the weightier ideas take a backseat for a series of toothless moviemaking spoofs.

In a world where the lacerating corporate filmmaking satire The Studio already exists, broad jokes about wacky animal trainers and ego-driven actors trying to influence their projects to benefit their own roles just won’t cut it. (Anaconda was co-written and directed by Tom Gormican, whose previous movie, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, was another winking cinematic caricature with a great premise and an underwhelming execution.)

All four leads are very game to look very silly, and I applaud them for that. I can hardly blame them for signing on to this project, as awkwardly constructed as it may be. There are so few big-screen comedies of any kinds made these days, that you take the work wherever you can get it.

Anaconda’s early scenes, set in Buffalo and seemingly shot there, look appropriately shabby; the interiors are cluttered and drab, and filled with overexposed daylight pouring in from unshaded windows. For a couple of minutes, Rudd and Black’s characters get to act like authentic friends who’ve lost touch and reconnected over their mutual love of movies, over this art form’s power to tell stories that unite people in the dark through their shared connection and humanity.

Then they go and run from a CGI snake for an hour. One sad I thought had watching Anaconda: If this is the only stuff modern Hollywood makes now, would these aspiring auteurs even want to work there anymore?

RATING: 4/10