Anaconda (2025)

Anaconda arrives as a 2025 meta-reboot of a 1997 creature feature that few were clamoring to revisit, and it carries the weary self-awareness of a studio cashing a nostalgia check while winking at the audience about the transaction. A quartet of midlife friends, played by Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn, and Thandiwe Newton, travel to the Amazon to shoot a low-budget remake of the film they loved in their youth. A giant snake eats several of them. The screenplay is aware that this is funny, and it reminds us of this awareness at regular intervals. The result is a comedy horror that earned mixed notices and a fifth-place opening, which is its own quiet verdict on the exercise.

The cast is notably diverse for the genre. Newton anchors the group as a Black woman with no narrative burden attached to the fact, and Brazilian performers Daniela Melchior and Selton Mello fill out the jungle contingent. Ice Cube appears as himself in the third act, weapon in hand, radiating the specific dignity of a man who has been in this franchise before. None of this is treated as a subject. The film simply hires good actors and lets them be eaten. There is no racial commentary, no feminist argument, and no LGBTQ presence at all.

For a film set in the Amazon and built on a joke about studio ownership, the absence of any sermonizing is almost defiant. No climate plea interrupts the snake. No critique of capital emerges from the cease-and-desist letter. The movie wants only to be a pleasant, violent romp, and it succeeds at roughly half of that. What lingers is the faint melancholy of a franchise that has now eaten itself, and found the meal agreeable enough to serve anyway.