‘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

‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’ is Kinda Heavy, Man

April 21, 2022

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The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent (CREDIT: Karen Ballard/Lionsgate)

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Tiffany Haddish, Sharon Horgan, Ike Barinholtz, Alessandra Mastronardi, Lily Sheen, Jacob Scipio, Neil Patrick Harris

Director: Tom Gormican

Running Time: 107 Minutes

Rating: R for Mainly Salty Language and a Few Shootouts

Release Date: April 22, 2022 (Theaters)

How self-aware is too self-aware? That’s a question inherent to the life of any movie star, but it’s especially salient in the case of Nicolas Cage. He’s equally beloved, mocked, or lovingly mocked for his over-the-top performances in the likes of Ghost Rider, Face/Off, The Wicker Man, and countless others. Word eventually got around to him that he was more meme than man in some corners, but instead of winking at repudiating this reputation, he’s mostly continued to follow his own particular muse in the form of his self-professed “Nouveau Shamanic” acting style. But now he’s forced to confront his career as thoroughly as possible as he plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. I’m one of the biggest Nic Cage fans in the world, so my feeling coming into this flick was that it would either be my new favorite movie ever, or it would be a little too on the nose. The truth is somewhere in the middle, as Cage is of course up for whatever, but there are some Uncanny Valley-esque vibes.

The setup is basically National Treasure meets Bowfinger: in the midst of an existential crisis that has him contemplating retirement, Cage is surreptitiously hired by the CIA to aid in some geopolitical subterfuge. It all goes down in the sun-dappled vistas of Mallorca, where he’s fulfilling a million-dollar gig to attend the birthday party of Javi (Pedro Pascal), a budding screenwriter who’s also the suspected head of a cartel and supposed mastermind behind a recent kidnapping. But mostly, he’s an audience surrogate, with the obsessive collection of Nic Cage memorabilia to prove it. If you’re thinking that somebody who loves Nicolas Cage this much couldn’t possibly be that bad, then you should know that one of this movie’s core messages is to trust your instincts.

And what do my instincts tell me as I’m writing this review? Mostly, they say that I was kind of weirded out by how similar this Nic Cage is to the real thing without being exactly the same. Offscreen, he has a few ex-wives and two sons, while the Massively Talent-ed version has at least one ex (Sharon Horgan) that’s still a part of his daily life and a daughter named Addy (Lily Sheen). I don’t know what his relationships with his sons are like, but I hope that he’s not forcing them to watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to the point that they need to hash it out in therapy. This is all to say, Unbearable Weight gets the broad-stroke details of Cage’s unique story correct, but it renders his mystique a bit too quotidian. It’s respectful, but not transcendent. It pulls off the requisite action-adventure thrills just fine, but if you really want to know what makes this man tick, just check out any of his interviews.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is Recommended If You Like: Nonstop introspection, Geeking out about German expressionism and Paddington, Emotional straight male bonding

Grade: 3 out of 5 Nouveau Shamans