ANACONDA
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Columbia) Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuhrer, Vincent Castellanos. Screenplay: Hans Bauer and Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. Producers: Verna Harrah, Leonard Rabinowitz and Carole Little. Director: Luis Llosa. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, profanity) Running Time: 92 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
If you have never had the opportunity to read the press notes for a Hollywood film, you are missing an art form with more inspired comedy than most of what they put on the screen. I'm not saying the humor is intentional. Take ANACONDA, for instance, about which co-star Kari Wuhrer opines in the press notes: "There is a subtle message in this film...(about) messing around with what is the most awesome, incredible power on the planet: the Amazon Jungle." You only wish you could see her try to say that with a straight face, to see what _really_ good acting is. There are plenty of words one could use to describe ANACONDA, but "subtle" ain't one of them. B-movies don't get much B-movie-er than this one, which doesn't mean it's a bad film. On its own level -- thanks to some hilariously ghoulish special effects -- it's actually something of a guilty pleasure.
The story begins with a documentary film crew preparing for a trip down the Amazon River. Anthropologist Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz) is searching for a legendary but never-documented native tribe, and brings along a crew of five people -- director Terri Flores (Jennifer Lopez), cameraman Danny Rich (Ice Cube), sound engineer Gary Dixon (Owen Wilson), production manager Denise Kalberg (Kari Wuhrer) and narrator Warren Westridge (Jonathan Hyde) -- to record that search. But the journey takes an unexpected turn when the crew finds a man named Paul Sarone (Jon Voight) stranded on a grounded boat, and agree to take him along. What the crew doesn't know is that Sarone has his own agenda for the trip, which involves tracking down a legendary 40-foot anaconda with a big appetite and an even bigger attitude.
I offer a warning here that some of the following information might be considered spoilers, assuming you have been hermetically sealed away from pop culture and have never seen a suspense film. ANACONDA doesn't work very hard to buck the conventions of the genre; in fact, it seems to revel in them. As one might expect, characters die. As one might also expect, they generally die in inverse order of their placement in the credits. ANACONDA even steals a page from 1980s slasher films by giving a monster a taste for those with questionable moral fiber. Smoke a joint? Dead. Have premarital sex (or even _think_ about having it)? Dead. Shoot a monkey? Dead. The script serves up stock characters like the pompous prima donna Westridge and the villainous poacher Sarone with a giddy disregard for anything but plot, plot and more plot.
Not that the plot makes much sense (beginning with why the narrator is along on the shoot in the first place), or even moves very briskly for a suspense thriller. Director Luis Llosa (THE SPECIALIST) often can't seem to decide whether ANACONDA is about the conflict with the snake or the conflict with Sarone, and it proves to be a mistake to focus on the shipboard clashes when it means the characters are going to have to talk for any length of time. Owen Wilson (BOTTLE ROCKET), a dead ringer for Dennis Hopper, creates a sense of APOCALYPSE NOW deja vu when he starts talking about Sarone like he was Col. Kurtz; vapid Kari Wuhrer pronounces the word "satiated" like someone reading it off the page for the first time without knowing what it means. Voight, whose perpetual sneer and absurd Paraguayan accent make Pacino's performance in SCARFACE look positively subdued, goes madly over the top and looks like he's the only person having any fun. At least Eric Stoltz had the good sense to grab his check and spend half the film in a coma.
So why, then, is ANACONDA more fun than glorified B-movies like TWISTER or INDEPENDENCE DAY? Because it never pretends to be anything more, and because it includes the kind of scenes a good monster movie needs: moments which leave you laughing even as you are going "eeewwwww." Sometimes a film only needs one really memorable scene to leave you feeling a goofy sense of satisfaction. ANACONDA boasts at least three, including a shot from inside the snake's digestive system (the Ana-colon-cam?) and it doesn't even matter that the computer-generated snake is nobody's idea of state-of-the-art visual effects work. A B-movie shouldn't be out to impress you. ANACONDA is simplistic, and could have used more of its monster, but it delivers. I'll look for my "subtle messages" in movies that aren't about 40-foot-long killer snakes.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 coils of the wild: 6.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Subscribe to receive reviews directly via email See details on the MoviePage
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews