Knee-jerk review: "Anaconda"

1. It can be hard to accurately judge the comic content of a movie when you're sitting in a crowded theater surrounded by people howling with laughter.  You can definitely get swept up in it.
2. But this movie certainly seems hilarious.
3. There's at least three moments of over-the-top, are-they-really-doing-that insanity.
4. The boar sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
5. Jack Black's sweaty, arched brows intensity is an acquired taste that we still haven't yet fully acquired, but it works pretty well here.
6. Paul Rudd, on the other hand, is 100% always a slam dunk.  He's fantastic.
7. This movie is the very definition of looking-glass meta, taking place in a world where the original 1997 Anaconda exists and this gaggle of frustrated filmmakers - played by recognizable stars of 2025 - decide to remake it, which leads to an unending run of inside baseball gags about the movie business and a commentary on sequels like the one we're watching.
8. At first we were going to argue that movies about people in the movie business aren't usually appealing to mass audiences, but this one at least tries to make it more about the friendship of this group of misfits and a need to chase your dream no matter what.  It'll do.
9. "Sometimes I go to Trader Joe's just to feel the air conditioning" is a fantastic living-in-L.A. joke and we are here for it.
10. Yes, we get some obligatory cameos from the original movie.  Of course we do.
11. Selton Mello - playing a deeply weird snake wrangler - steals the movie, which is hard to do when Black and Rudd (and Steve Zahn doing funny Steve Zahn things) are around.
12. Effective movies, even goofy diversions like this, have to sell in the first few minutes that the hero's life is in some significant way an unsatisfying dead end.  The adventure in the movie we're watching is what will ultimately pull the hero out of that awful life.  Anaconda spells this out explicitly with some business about Jack Black's life being "B, maybe B-plus."
13. Bonus points for a pretty decent character reversal plot twist involving stolen gold.  Remember the old adage that comedy plots still need to work without the jokes.
14. For the record, Sir Mix A Lot's comic "Baby Got Back" rap song with its infamous anaconda lyric came out in 1992, five years before the Jennifer Lopez movie.  But we have no recollection whether her Anaconda featured the song.  As you might imagine, Jack Black's Anaconda most definitely does use the song.
15. Way more funny than we expected.  This has to have really good word-of-mouth, right?

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