Rating: C-
Dir: Tom Gormican.
Star: Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton.
It’s kinda sad that the Chinese, straight to streaming remake, was clearly more enjoyable than this. Gormican and Kevin Etten’s script seems too interested in tying itself in meta-knots. For being a remake is not enough: this is instead about a group of film-makers who go to the Amazon to remake the original movie. There’s writer-director Doug McCallister (Black, basically playing Jack Black. Again), who used to make films with childhood friend Ronald Griffen (Rudd) , now a background actor. When they reunite, the project is hatched, dragging in lead actress Claire Simonsand (Newton) and cinematographer with a substance abuse problem, Kenny Trent (Zahn). They quickly end up on a boat going up the Amazon, pursued by gold smugglers, personal issues and, occasionally, a large reptile.
There’s a number of interesting ways this approach might have gone. If I’d been making it, I’d have gone with turning Doug and Ronald into Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, destroying each other and everything around them, for the sake of their art. Instead, we get pee jokes and so little sense of threat, the one time a major character is seriously threatened, it’s not at all convincing. At least the original kills off multiple actors of whom you’d heard. Nor, incidentally, is Queensland a convincing stand-in for the Amazon. I’ve seen Aguirre, Wrath of God and Burden of Dreams. Ain’t nobody dragging no ship over any mountain here. Ain’t nobody constructing an animatronic snake with forty miles of wiring either.
That applies both to the film, and the film within the film. They can’t afford a giant snake, so hire a local with a reasonably sized one, until an unfortunate (and amusing) accident puts an end to that. Like the original, the real monster doesn’t show up until later. The problem here is, what fills the time is not very interesting. The meta-film, called The Anaconda, is fairly bad, but we never see enough of it to make much difference. Instead, there’s bickering between Doug and Ronald, a boat driver with a dark secret, and sexual tension between Ronald and Claire, which is about as unconvincing as the meta-snake. Though I did actually like Newton, since she gives Claire an authenticity, missing from the other characters.
The Gormican-Etten pairing previously gave us the similarly-meta The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent with Nicolas Cage. Had I known that, I would perhaps have skipped it entirely, since Hollywood navel-gazing is of precious little interest to me. If this had genuinely been an attempt to remake the original on a budget of forty-three thousand dollars (along the lines of another Black vehicle, the heavily flawed Be Kind Rewind), I’d have been down for that. Though the luxurious river boat on which they set sail would have cost more than that, all by itself. Instead, this cost $45 million – the same as the original, admittedly unadjusted for inflation. There are a couple of amusing cameos, mostly based on the idea of a rival, big-budget remake proceeding simultaneously. But this angle isn’t developed into much more than an excuse for some gratuitous pyrotechnics.
I couldn’t honestly bring myself to tag this in the horror category, because it is almost ruthlessly scrubbed of all elements which might generate fear. It’s largely a comedy, and one whose success will depend heavily on your tolerance for Jack Black doing Jack Black things [the contrast to his driven, wilderness film-maker in King Kong couldn’t be greater]. It’s a schtick for which my patience is increasingly limited, and the rest of the cast here don’t do enough – or get enough chances – to counterbalance it. They may mock Jon Voight’s accent, and rightfully so. But that was still more amusing than the majority of this.