Anaconda

Roger Ebert is a sucker for old-school adventure movies. He copped to this weakness in his review of Congo, which he described as “a splendid example of a genre no longer much in fashion, the jungle adventure story.” Perhaps this explains his otherwise inexplicable decision to award 3 1/2 stars to Anaconda, a film not otherwise honored by posterity. It’s a good, even great, B-movie, but I have to ask what curve he graded this on.

Admittedly, there’s much to recommend the film. Its cast is top-notch: Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuher, and Danny Trejo. Voight gives the most memorable performance as a crazed, Peruvian (um…) swamp-rat. It puts me in mind of Depp’s later performance as Jack Sparrow, in that it’s so bizarre you just have to accept it on its own terms. The individual characters, even the ones just along to be snake-fodder, are given some depth. The production design is sound and the direction competent. The CG effects looked dated, but then so do those from Air Force One. CG was still in transition in 1997 and much of it hasn’t aged well. Conversely, Fifth Element still looks gorgeous.

It’s also worth remembering that we’re only a year out from the dreadful The Ghost and the Darkness, a similar film but set in Africa with lions instead of snakes. You’ll never see a review of that here because I’ll be damned if I’m going to set through that interminable slop again. If you’re not going to make a great movie at least make it entertaining. Also, no film which includes a character inquiring “hey, is that real dynamite?” can be all bad. We’re going to skip over Kari Wuher’s inferior line reads, the waste of Ice Cube and Eric Stoltz, and the general worthlessness of Owen Wilson.

And yes, it was real dynamite. Well, real dynamite in the film. Fake dynamite in real life.

I would class this as a Jaws rip-off. We’ve all seen Jaws; all modern monster movies descend from it and adopt its structure, its tropes. The real interest is in whether this Jaws derivative/rip-off offers anything new or at least executes its ideas competently. Examples of films which do include Deep Blue Sea (novel take on character death scene) and The Car (creative mashup of monster-hunting triumvirate). Compare Tentacles, an incompetently-made Italian ripoff starring Henry Fonda, and Jaws 3, which (ineptly) transposed the original to a futuristic theme park administered by a villainous Louis Gossett, Jr. Anaconda‘s contribution is a main character working at cross-purposes to the rest of the heroes and a truly inspired performance from Voight. The Golden Raspberry nomination for this role was undeserved, though John Wilson did list this film as one of the “100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made.”

Anyway, the opening concept is that a “National Geographic” crew is heading up the Amazon River to find some long lost tribe. Along the way to pick up Voight who offers to be their guide for his own inscrutable motives (because of course). As is the case in these flicks things go from bad to worse throughout the first and second acts, setting us up for the showdown with the titular monster in the third. The only real points of interest involve the invariably grisly deaths of the main characters and the escalating madness of Voight.

Anaconda goes about its work with grim efficiency. Its design owes much to Jaws. We get a rack-focus shot and many ominous scenes at night punctuated by spotlights. Characters exchange meaningful glances. Characters are crushed by anacondas. The surviving characters then exchange more meaningful glances. All the while Jon Voight acts at right angles to everyone else with a permanently crazed expression on his face.

See the B-movie metric for an explanation of this outcome.