Anaconda

The Snake Eating Its Own Tail

I can't get one image from Tom Gormican's *Anaconda* out of my head. Jack Black's Doug—a wedding videographer from Buffalo, of all things—is barreling through the Amazon with a regurgitated feral hog taped to his back. It is an aggressively stupid sight gag, the sort of thing that probably killed in a late-night studio meeting. But Black sells it with this weird undertow of despair. His usual frantic scuttle is weighed down, and not just by the pig. He moves like a man suddenly realizing the childhood movies that shaped him might now be in the process of swallowing him whole. I have no idea whether that sadness is intentional or just what leaked out of a miserable shoot. Either way, it gives the movie a pulse whenever the endless self-awareness threatens to smother it.

Gormican is taking another run at Hollywood self-satire after *The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent*, and you can see the appeal of the premise. Four middle-aged friends, led by Black's Doug and Paul Rudd's Griff, a struggling LA background actor, scrape together the money to shoot a homemade tribute to the 1997 *Anaconda* because adulthood has curdled into disappointment. Naturally, instead of making the movie, they wind up trapped inside their own creature feature. It is a funny setup and, in theory, a decent way to skewer the reboot-addicted studio culture that keeps eating itself.



The snag is obvious once the film gets going: if you are mocking overproduced, spiritually empty IP recycling, it helps not to look like another overproduced, spiritually empty IP extension. Gormican clearly has affection for the slick nonsense of the Jennifer Lopez/Ice Cube original, especially its cheesy creature-feature shamelessness. But that affection keeps getting trapped inside the polish of a modern studio comedy. Characters keep talking about "themes" while they rig up bargain-bin camera gear, and the movie keeps announcing how scrappy it wants to be while looking far too expensive to convince anybody. David Ehrlich at IndieWire got there fast when he wrote that the film "is so slapdash and unsure of itself that it ultimately feels less like a bad in-joke than a case of a snake eating its own tail."

What saves it from total collapse is the cast's refusal to phone it in. Rudd is especially good at souring his natural charm. We know him as the easygoing center of gravity, and here that buoyancy has gone slightly rancid. After a blown take in the movie-within-the-movie, Griff flashes a smile that tightens a hair too much, and his eyes go dead behind it. It is a neat little portrait of a man who suspects he might not be very talented and cannot bear the confirmation. Thandiwe Newton, meanwhile, brings welcome grounded intelligence and fatigue to a part that mostly requires her to flee digital snakes. The ensemble has just enough warmth to make you wish the script had given them something sturdier to stand on.



There is one scene in the second half that shows the movie Gormican maybe wanted to make. The crew is busy staging a sequence for their tribute while a real anaconda glides through the water behind them. The film cuts between the grimy camcorder footage Doug is shooting and the sleek widescreen reality surrounding it. The contrast is the point. You can feel Gormican reaching for something about the distance between the movies we treasure and the lives we actually end up living.

I just wish he had relaxed into that idea instead of constantly stepping on it with toilet jokes and another elbow-in-the-ribs line about the studio system. Once a joke starts explaining itself, it usually dies.



Does this new *Anaconda* earn its existence? Not really. It is nowhere near as casually fun as the schlock it is trying to salute. Still, there is a faint accidental poetry in the way it misfires. These characters are trying to reclaim the magic of the movies that raised them, and they learn—same as the film itself—that you cannot bully lightning back into the bottle. They fail. In the act of recording that failure, the movie fails too. It is messy, sometimes in exhausting ways. But every now and then, when Black and Rudd are on that boat talking over the jungle hum about aging and disappointment, the mess feels human.