The Amazonian jungle may be sweltering, but Ice Cube makes it cool.
Nobody in Anaconda behaves like they’ve ever been on a boat before, let alone a high-end documentary expedition up the Amazon. The river is wide, the dialogue is wooden, and the snakes are, frankly, rubbery but therein lies this film’s dubious charm. Anaconda isn’t a film for herpetologists or, indeed, Herzog devotees. It’s a B-movie with a studio budget, an Oscar-winner in the cast, and a giant reptile with a grudge.
There’s a kind of magic in watching a film commit so confidently to its nonsense. Jennifer Lopez plays Terri Flores, a determined documentarian lugging a film crew upriver to find a reclusive Amazonian tribe. She anchors the film with more grace than it really deserves, offering a performance that suggests she thought she was making something far more serious. Ice Cube, as her sceptical cameraman Danny, is effortlessly watchable, mostly because he never quite stops looking like he can’t believe what’s happening around him, his deadpan reactions and casual exasperation feeling like the only honest response to the increasingly ludicrous events.
Eric Stoltz, nominally the male lead, spends most of the film unconscious in a bunk bed after an early encounter with a wasp up his windpipe. As a result, the dramatic heavy lifting falls to Jon Voight, who doesn’t so much steal scenes as hijack them at machete-point. His portrayal of snake-hunter Paul Serone is hypnotic for all the wrong reasons. The accent he deploys is borderline offensive, or at least it would be if it weren’t so utterly, utterly ridiculous. It’s unclear what region it’s meant to hail from – Paraguay by way of Speedy Gonzalez, perhaps – but it comes with enough theatrical eye-rolling and mock-Latino sneering to power a small generator.
There’s a strange satisfaction in watching a cast this solid try to navigate dialogue this bad. Owen Wilson pops up as a sound guy with a perma-grin and that laid-back drawl that hadn’t yet calcified into a schtick. He’s charmingly useless, but brief appearance reminds you why he would go on to bigger – and much better – things. Kari Wührer does what she can with the thankless role of “the girl who screams,” while Jonathan Hyde has fun seemingly reminiscing about his time on both Titanic and Jumanji as he endures this jungle river shipwreck. It’s a rich mix of performers that wouldn’t embarrass a mid-range disaster movie but here everyone seems to be working on different levels of irony, sincerity, and pay scale.
The real star, of course, is the snake or rather, the various animatronic and CG iterations of it, each one more inconsistent than the last. The creature defies physics, biology, and occasionally logic, but it does so with flair. Whether it’s bursting from the water like a scaly torpedo or vomiting up Jon Voight just to make a point, it’s clear that Anaconda isn’t interested in restraint, or accuracy.
To its credit, the film never tries to be anything it’s not. At a tight 89 minutes, it races through its jungle set pieces with the efficiency of a cable TV marathon staple. Director Luis Llosa leans into the pulp, delivering quick shocks, loud bangs, and enough creature close-ups to keep even the most nostalgic creature-feature fan content. It’s silly – aggressively so – but it’s also brisk and unpretentious.
There’s something to be said for the kind of film that knows its job is to make you yell “look out!” at the screen while clutching a bowl of popcorn. Anaconda doesn’t redefine the giant snake movie, assuming that was ever a genre with serious ambitions, but it slithers with confidence into the warm embrace of ‘90s cult status. It’s a terrible movie, and yet not an unwatchable one. There’s a self-aware stupidity to it all that gives Anaconda just enough bite to make it worth revisiting, at least once – and it’s still better than Disney’s Jungle Cruise.
