A movie like the recent “Anaconda” is a trend of movies that is still unfortunately on life support following its surprised box office return of $135 million worldwide making three times of what it cost to produce it.
Call it what you want. It’s a nostalgia reboot/remake or meta-reboot, but this trend of movies is being squeezed harder than the force of an actual snake. The 1997 original was no great movie by any means. But it was a cheesy When Nature Attacks movie featuring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Jon Voight in a famously bad guy performance that is a mixture of overacting and mugging that works mainly because Voight plays the biggest snake in the movie. Even the creature looks fake as if it was being held up by wires that were removed in post but the VFX team overestimated the weight. It made about the same amount worldwide but that was 1997 dollars.
Also Eric Stoltz played a character who lies in bed most of the time as he is unconscious flowing an accident. Basically the movie was another “Stay Out of the Jungle” themed horror about respecting nature.
Tom Gormichan, who directed and co-wrote the latest, seems to think we’re going to believe Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn and Thandiwe Newton, who are all in their 50s, are supposed to be in their late 30s/early 40s and the 1997 was a mega movie back in the day. It wasn’t and the deception is obvious. That’s what makes this movie such a hard sell.
Black plays Doug McCallister, a wannabe movie director, who ended up never leaving Buffalo, N.Y. and works as a wedding videographer. Zahn plays his friend and incompetent assistant Kenny Trent. Even if Kenny was played by someone 15-20 years younger, it would still be a pathetic character who battles substance abuse but we’re supposed to find it all funny. Rudd is Ronald Griffin Jr., or Griff, who’s had no success as an actor in Hollywood only appearing four times in “S.W.A.T.” which he keeps repeating. It’s funny the first time when he explains it’s how he was able to secure the rights to the 1997 original. It’s not funny the fifth or sixth time he keeps mentioning that he was in the show years earlier. Also are his friends so inept they can’t do a quick Google search to see that the movie wasn’t based on a Japanese Manga as he claims. Newton’s Claire Simons is a lawyer who should be smarter but is given nothing much to do. It’s just another movie in which Newton is under utilized.
And just like that they head to the Amazon River to film a remake/reboot. The first half of this movie seems to play like a send-up of these nostalgia flicks of recent years. There’s even a subtle reference to “Raiders: The Story of the Greatest Film Ever Made” about three friends who spent years from childhood to adulthood trying to do a shot-for-shot remake of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” using whatever materials they had available.
For a while the movie seems to work for silly laughs including a scene where Griff almost becomes lunch of a real anaconda being used. He later throws it overboard the ship when filming a scene thinking the snake is going to eat him resulting in it being chopped up in the ship’s propellers. This reminds me of the story on the first “Friday the 13th” where a reported pet snake was killed unintentionally for a scene.
But then the movie takes on a more generic and serious action thriller route as they encounter a suspicious woman, Ana Almeida (Daniela Melchior), and a subplot about illegal gold miners. They also discover Griff has been lying as Sony has sent a film crew to the Amazon River to do an official remake. This leads to a cameo by Cube that works well. There’s also a cameo by Lopez at the end that doesn’t work at all especially since it looks like it was filmed apart from the movie altogether.
The original movie didn’t take itself too seriously and even seem to revel in its B-movie nod to old American International Pictures flicks like this. The meta-reboot is too busy winking at the camera that many of the jokes seem like they were left over from other movies. Because the plot becomes more action-oriented in the second half, most of the characters seem to just run around screaming and hollering loudly as if it’s funny. It isn’t.
There’s a gag at the end involving a title card where Sony issues a cease-and-decease letter to the unofficial “Anaconda.” I suggest they do that to all future movies like this.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 