ANACONDA
A Film Review by Brian Takeshita
Rating: *1/2 out of ****
Well, what are you going to expect? It's a movie about a big snake that eats people. That's what I should have been thinking when I viewed this film, because maybe then I would have enjoyed myself more. Instead, I ended up wishing a giant snake would come along and eat me, too.
ANACONDA is about a documentary film crew sailing down a South American river. Led by anthropologists Dr. Steven Cale (Eric Stolz) and Terri Flores (Jennifer Lopez), the crew is attempting to locate a lost tribe of natives. Along the way, they find poacher Paul Sarone (Jon Voight), and become unwillingly embroiled in his quest to capture the elusive anaconda. To simply say that this is the world's largest snake wouldn't be doing it justice, since the anaconda in this movie is at least two feet wide. If this isn't a good reason to avoid picking up hitchhikers, I don't know what is.
At the beginning of ANACONDA, we find that Flores and Cale have had some kind of relationship in the past, but that seems to be more or less over now. I expected that fact to play a key part somewhere down the line, but it ended up being a set-up for nothing. Cale chokes on a deadly wasp (don't ask me how that happens - I don't know) and is put out of action, relegated to being the person whom the rest of the film crew must get back to civilization for medical help. This minimally helps to add a sense of urgency for the plot, since this goal now comes in direct conflict with Sarone's plan to capture the snake. However, this is negated by the fact that Cale seems to get better by himself about halfway through the film, and in any event still results in zero payoff from the relationship angle.
Most bad characters are either annoying or stupid. In this movie, they're both. Since this description applies to all the characters except Sarone, it's hard to find someone to root for. You're supposed to back the good guys, but you really end up cheering for Sarone because he's smarter than everyone else. Or maybe he's just not as dumb as everyone else. At times, I almost found myself rooting for the snake.
There are no standout performances here. Everyone seems to be reciting lines written for stock characters. Even Voight appears to be doing his best impression of Christopher Walken for some reason.
No matter, as in most monster movies, the snake is supposed to be the real star anyway. In most of the scenes, the snake is computer generated, and the effects crew did a decent job of making it look real. However, the realism is thrown off by some pretty unrealistic occurrences. Sometimes, for example, the snake just moves too fast. It catches a guy jumping off of a waterfall, for crying out loud. Then there's another scene where the snake eats one of the characters, and we see the snake's skin drawn so tightly over its prey that we can see the victim's pained expression from within the snake's belly. Absolutely ridiculous.
A testimony to the film's bad direction is the inclusion of a scene early on the in the film, where we get to see just how dangerous the mighty anaconda is. In a scene totally unrelated to anything else, we are witness to the big snake winning a showdown with a panther. The anaconda wraps itself around the powerful feline as if it were a stuffed animal and squeezes it so hard, one of the panther's eyeballs pops out. Eeeewwwww. Above and beyond the sick factor, however, this scene surprised me because it actually showed the face of the snake before a quarter of the movie had even passed. In films like these, a sense of mystery surrounding the monster must be maintained. If the characters are reacting to something they fear more than see, we as an audience must experience that feeling along with them. To show us the monster early on is to let us in on something the characters don't know about, and therefore allow us to get used to the danger before the pivotal moment when man and beast have their climactic showdown. In a case like that, the showdown just ends up being a letdown. When I saw the snake for the first time, I decided to give the film the benefit of the doubt and assume that the snake I saw wasn't the REAL danger. This one was just a decoy, and there was actually a BIGGER snake waiting to make its appearance just when everyone thought they were safe. No such luck. Okay, maybe ANACONDA is actually a decoy, and there's really a BETTER movie waiting to make its debut.
Review posted June 12, 1998
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