‘Anaconda’ 2025 Reboot Edition is Just the Right Sort of Silly-Meta

December 23, 2025

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

They want more than none (CREDIT: Matt Grace)

Starring: Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn, Daniela Melchior, Selton Mello, Ione Skye

Director: Tom Gormican

Running Time: 99 Minutes

Rating: December 25, 2025 (Theaters)

Release Date: PG-13 for Chomping and Squeezing and Some Drug Tripping

What’s It About?: Back in the ’90s, a group of friends were dreaming of a silver screen future. But flash-forward to the 2020s, and they’ve all settled into B-grade (maybe B+) lives. Doug (Jack Black) is a wedding videographer whose cinematic instincts keep getting rebuffed by his clients; Griff (Paul Rudd) is a bit part actor whose big break is nowhere in sight; Kenny (Steve Zahn) is working as Doug’s screwup assistant and trying to get sober; and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) is adrift in her foundering marriage. Upon reuniting, they decide in the thrill of the moment to produce an amateur remake of one of their favorite movies of all time: the notorious 1997 creature feature Anaconda. So then they actually fly down to the Amazon, rent a real live snake, and start shooting an actual goshdang moving picture. But it doesn’t take long for things to become pear-shaped, as the crew gets tightly wrapped within a misadventure that’s starting to resemble the original way more than they bargained for.

What Made an Impression?: How Not to Get Bit By an Excess of Cleverness: I haven’t been closely following the pre-production leading up to 2025’s Anaconda, but this definitely feels like a case of desperately trying to reboot intellectual property by any means possible. Settling on a goofy self-aware version could have been too cute by half, but with Jack Black and Paul Rudd in the leads, you’ve got the exact right stars to thread the needle. And honestly, Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten’s script gets the point across pretty well on its own. As for the rest of the main players, Steve Zahn is absolutely a reliable enough supporting player, while Thandiwe Newton may be a little less practiced in this arena, but she understands the assignment as well as everybody else.
Subheading About What Made an Impression: As an example of how Anaconda makes the meta approach work, characters say the word “themes” as a punch line all by itself multiple times… and it works each time! (It certainly helps that one of the horror themes du jour they’re poking fun at is intergenerational trauma.)
Making It Happen: If Anaconda wants us to teach a lesson alongside all the slithering chaos, there are two opposing pitfalls it could have easily fallen into: telling us that it’s much safer to just give up on our dreams, or stubbornly insisting that we never give up on our dreams no matter what our reality. It’s not cynical enough for the former, and it’s actually thoughtful enough to avoid the latter. The message (as sweetly underscored by Doug’s wife Malie, played by the always-sweet Ione Skye) isn’t that we should just drop all our responsibilities to reclaim our lost passions. But rather, if we don’t give ourselves a chance (or at least an indulgence) every once in a while, our souls will just slowly wither away. And if we’re lucky, our most supportive loved ones will be there to nudge us along (and hopefully serve as our emergency contacts in case anything goes wrong!).

Anaconda (2025) is Recommended If You Like: Scream but wish that it were a creature feature

Grade: 3 out of 5 Themes

‘Fast X’ Asks If This Can Really Last Forever

May 17, 2023

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Family (CREDIT: Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures)

Starring: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jason Momoa, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Sung Kang, Nathalie Emmanuel, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Brie Larson, Alan Ritchson, Jason Statham, Daniela Melchior, Leo Abelo Perry, Scott Eastwood, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno

Director: Louis Leterrier

Running Time: 141 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Flying Cars and Bullets

Release Date: May 19, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: We’re ten* films deep now in the Fast & Furious franchise (eleven if you count the spinoff), and things are getting pretty X-treme! Of course, you might well reasonably note that extremity was this series’ m.o. from the very beginning. But this is the first time that an “X” actually managed to sneak its way into the title. And that’s not the only unique bit of business. Usually these movies are pretty self-contained, and the plot is generally besides the point, but Fast X calls back directly to a previous adventure. Luckily for anyone who needs a refresher, there are plenty of flashbacks to Fast Five, when Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew pulled off a heist in Brazil against drug lord Hernan Reyes. Now Hernan’s eccentric and sadistic son Dante (Jason Momoa) is out for revenge. He prefers to make his victims suffer, and for someone who values family as much as Dom, there are innumerable ways to poke at that nerve.

More

‘The Suicide Squad’ is Silly, Violent, Imaginative, and Easy Enough to Follow

August 4, 2021

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Suicide Squad (CREDIT: Warner Bros./Screenshot)

Starring: Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, Jai Courtney, Peter Capaldi, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior, Michael Rooker, Alice Braga, Pete Davidson, Nathan Fillion, Sean Gunn, Flula Borg, Steve Agee, Storm Reid, Taika Waititi

Director: James Gunn

Running Time: 132 Minutes

Rating: R for Various Body Parts Getting Torn Apart, a Full Roster of Potty Mouths, and a Little Bit of Nudity

Release Date: August 5, 2021 (Theaters and HBO Max)

The Suicide Squad feels like it came from another dimension. It shares a few characters with 2016’s (no “the”) Suicide Squad and has essentially the same premise. It’s ostensibly a sequel to that earlier effort, but it’s effectively a do-over. There are plenty of reboots every year at the multiplex, but rarely do we have such an unabashed mulligan. The multiverse theory posits that there is an infinite number of realities with any number of minor or major variations, and it seems that we’ve somehow been visited by the one in which James Gunn directed a Suicide Squad movie instead of David Ayer. Adding to this surreal state of affairs was the fact that I was in a bit of a fugue state while watching The Suicide Squad. It was a 10:00 AM screening, my first morning trip to a movie theater post-pandemic. My body was confused by the lack of sunlight at the early hour and thus my brain was unsure if it should be waking or dreaming. Either way, heads were always fated to explode.

The Suicide Squad takes a cue from Suicide Squad by having multiple beginnings, but this time it’s a cheeky bit of purposeful misdirection instead of stinky studio manipulation. Suicide squads are famously expendable, and it turns out that there are degrees of expendability, as one squad is introduced with plenty of fanfare only to serve as a diversion. Everyone involved clearly wanted to feature as many characters as possible to essentially say, “Can you believe all of the colorful ridiculousness that has actually appeared in DC Comics?” The team that we spend most of our time with consists of the ever-popular Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), a couple of sharpshooters (Idris Elba, John Cena), a queen of rodents (Daniela Melchior), and a guy who shoots polka dots out of his mouth (David Dastmalchian). They’re sent to the fictional South American island nation of Corto Maltese for some top secret political meddling, but a date with the fantastical awaits them.

I wasn’t prepared for the Big Bad in The Suicide Squad to be a giant starfish, but that is indeed what awaited me. And quite frankly, I’m glad that that’s what we got. I can take or leave the gleeful over-the-top violence; it’s good for a few laughs, but after a couple of hours, I’m exhausted by the fact that I’m not really meant to care about any of these characters (although a few do manage to find a small place in my heart). So I’m grateful that there’s a surplus of visual imagination to appreciate. Way too many extraterrestrial cinematic CGI creatures of the past 15 years or so are some variation on big bad bugs, so a massive starfish that squirts out hundreds of smaller starfish is a relief. I’d be happy to see Starro rolling around every future corner of the big-screen DC universe, whether or not the reject crew is around.

So in conclusion, if you like kooky superpowers at their absolute kookiest and rats getting their time in the spotlight, you’ll probably have a decent time with the Suicide Squad.

The Suicide Squad is Recommended If You Like: The trailers for 2016’s Suicide Squad, bodily mutilation played for laughs, Mouse Hunt

Grade: 3 out of 5 Rats