Review by Gerald Tan (The Flying Inkpot)
Like all the great movies about those now storied fish and reptiles who have terrorized men and women on film - JAWS, ORCA, PIRANHA, ALLIGATOR, and CROCODILE DUNDEE - ANACONDA pits what is essentially a destructive anthropomorphic symbol of evil against an ensemble of largely clueless men and women. So get your scorecard out, scribe at the top of it : "Big Freaking Snake vs. Documentary Film Crew + Unscrupulous Snake Hunter" and decide which characters you want to root for, and which you want to see get crushed, eaten, and regurgitated by a 40-foot long anaconda.
The incidental story line goes like this - a bunch of National Geographic-approved types go out on an expedition on the Amazon River to document the fabled Shirishama Indians, the People of the Mist. The route is terribly scenic and their barge very reminiscent of the AFRICAN QUEEN. The crew themselves are an impressively charismatic lot as well - there's Eric Stoltz (TWO DAYS IN THE VALLEY) who leads the team, tough but luscious Jennifer Lopez (MONEY TRAIN) as the film producer, rap hard man Ice Cube, Owen Wilson from BOTTLE ROCKET, and the always delectable Kari Wuhrer (THINNER, HIGHER LEARNING) as the production manager with an attitude who can move extremely well to music in sweltering nights on a boat in the middle of the Amazon River. A movie about a monster snake never had a more promising cast.
In fact, everything goes swimmingly until the plot inevitably thickens. In the middle of a rainstorm they pick up from his broken yacht Jon Voight in his guise as a priest-turned-snake-hunter. Voight plays it cool, apologizing and offering to impose only as long as it takes to get to the next village. By his bad accent, curling sneer, pony-tail and the general air of low-rent villany about him, we can tell that this Paul Sarone person has a nasty surprise or two up his sleeve for our unsuspecting film crew. But Stoltz's Steve Cale, making us wonder how on earth he ever got his doctorate in anthropology starts yelling accomodatingly to Sarone over the howling rain, "DON'T APOLOGIZE! WE'RE ALL AT THE MERCY OF OUR MACHINES!" It's quite amusing then when Stoltz ends up with a poisonous wasp in his mouth and is incapacitated for most of the rest of the movie. And when this happens, Sarone takes over the expedition and sees that everybody else ends up at the mercy of the giant anaconda that he's hunting (because "snake this big... worth a million. Mebbe two").
Now if you're hoping for this giant anaconda to be, as advertised, the "shape of your fears," you're going to be more than a little let down by snake animatronics and computer animation that occasionally looks dubious and phoney (sort of like a poor man's JURASSIC PARK). Even so, there are a few gripping scenes, not the least of which is one where you get to see someone swallowed by the snake from a camera angle on the INSIDE of the creature. And then spit out. Too cool.
What's worst about ANACONDA though, is that it's a total waste of assembled talent. The characterisation is practically non-existent, and even the redoubtable Jon Voight turns in the hammiest performance of his career.
A welcome relief to the almost resounding banality of the characters comes by way of Jonathan Hyde as Westridge, the whining British presenter of the Shirishama documentary who, in the circumstances that he's been haplessly thrust in, finds a surprising measure of courage. Otherwise, this picturesque but ultimately mediocre adventure-thriller just thrashes it way to its predictable end.
Review by Marty Mapes (Excerpts)
When the characters were introduced, each was an exaggerated caricature. There's the producer (Eric Stoltz) and the director (Jennifer Lopez) who just happen to identify each other's job title in their conversation. Most of us could have figured this out without "I wanted only the BEST DIRECTOR (hint, hint, wink) I could find." There's the production manager (Kari Wuhrer) and the sound man (Owen Wilson) who just happen to identify each other's job title in their conversation (as if the clipboard and the microphone didn't give them away). Then there's the "talent" (Jonathan Hyde) who is an uptight prick. We could have learned about this character flaw when he started driving golf balls, sipping wine, and turning his nose up at rap music on the jungle river. But lest we miss that point, the screenwriters (Hans Bauer, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.) have him ask the first woman he sees to carry his bags. Duh. We got it already.
And of course, to round out the adolescent worldview of the movie, there is cheesy dialog. Here are some examples in no particular order. "You and whose army?" "Yo mama's." "This river can kill you in a thousand ways."
Review by Rydain (Excerpts)
I was prepared to suspend reality if the movie would have been worth it. Unfortunately, Anaconda was about as suspenseful and exciting as watching paint peel. My friend and I even successfully predicted who would live at the end. Anybody can tell the bad guy is going to die eventually. That was a pity because...he was the most likable character in the movie. Who wouldn't enjoy somebody who looks like a deranged Walt Whitman?
Anaconda did have its cute moments: arguments between Ice Cube's character and the British guy, for instance. However, those small flashes of wit were not worth the other hour and twenty-eight minutes of boring schlock.
Review by Scott Renshaw (Excerpts)
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.
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.
Review by Steve Rhodes (Excerpts)
Giving the only respectable acting performance in the show, Hip Hopper and actor Ice Cube plays the documentary cameraman. As the one credible character on the boat, the audience can use his part as a standard to judge the degree of ridiculousness of the others.
Shakespearean actor Jonathan Hyde is cast as the documentary's narrator Warren Westridge. Warren, the quintessential twit, drinks his white wine from his personal crystal goblet while floating down the Amazon in a beat-up barge.
As the characters die in the movie, see if you notice an interesting relationship with the order of their death and the actor's probable salary.
Review by James Berardinelli (Excerpts)
The relatively thin plot centers around a documentary film crew venturing deep into the Amazon to make a movie about the discovery of a lost tribe. Dr. Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz), a cultural anthropologist, is heading up the expedition. First-time director Terri Florez (Jennifer Lopez), Cale's girlfriend, leads the film crew. Also on the trip are Danny (Ice Cube), the cinematographer; Warren Westridge (Jonathan Hyde), the snooty British narrator; Gary (Owen Wilson), the sound man; and Denise (Kari Wuhrer), the production manager. Along the way, they rescue the mysterious and sinister Paul Sarone (Jon Voight), a snake catcher who is after the most lucrative capture of his life.
The men and women populating ANACONDA are uninteresting types. Despite all the time devoted to interpersonal interaction at the beginning of the film, we learn very little about these people beyond certain basic facts: their names, their jobs, and who they're sleeping with. Such obligatory, wooden personalities are incapable of exciting our imagination or our sympathy. By the time the carnage starts, we're strangely detached from the would-be heroes.
Many of the actors appear to be on hand mostly to collect a paycheck. Jennifer Lopez, who was so impressive in SELENA, dutifully plods through her role here without exhibiting any real spark or energy. Eric Stoltz and Ice Cube quickly fade into the background, where they're all-but-forgotten by the script. Jonathan Hyde (the big game hunter from JUMANJI) provides a little comic relief, but nothing on the order of Bill Paxton's contribution to ALIENS. The only one guilty of sinking his teeth into his part is Jon Voight, who develops Sarone into a creepy, charismatic figure.
Review by Terry Lawson (Free Press Movie Critic)
According to the straight-faced preface of "Anaconda," there are Indian tribes in the Amazon who not only believe in 40-foot snakes who hunt man for sport but also worship them.
This, then, would seem to be the target audience for this ludicrous monster movie. But it would probably take a tribe a lot less sophisticated than Amazon Indians to be taken in by "Anaconda," which for thrills and suspense ranks right up there with a rubber snake in a spring-loaded can.
Indeed, we are on the Amazon with the usual boat load of likable, lovable and downright detestable suspects less than a knot or two before it becomes apparent that the film's only hope is to turn itself into a classic bad movie like "Mothra" or "Prophecy." And there seems to be a fairly good chance of that when the documentary crew, searching for a lost tribe known as "The People of the Mist" and headed by Professor Hale (Eric Stoltz), stops to rescue storm-stranded stranger Paul Sarone, played with a bad scar and worse Portuguese accent by Jon Voight.
Sarone is a snake hunter, and he sure seems to know a lot about the river. So Hale and the crew, which includes director Terri (Jennifer Lopez), cinematographer Danny (Ice Cube), the pompous British narrator Westridge (Jonathan Hyde) and a couple of perky production assistants (Owen Wilson and Kari Wuhrer) are not altogether undesirous of his company, especially after he saves Hale's life by extracting a poisonous scorpion from his throat.
But with Hale incapacitated, Sarone's suggestion to change course and head toward an area where the giant anaconda allegedly lurks seems a little, well, suspicious.
Nobody on the film crew, though, stops to ask the obvious question: "What would Ken Burns do in this situation?" Instead, crew members do all the things people in really bad movies always do. Even before the young and attractive production assistants sneak off the boat in the middle of the night, we have figured them for disposable, and the narrator is such a disagreeable twit he might as well be wearing a name tag that says "snake food." But just about the time we've made up our minds to root for the snake, he ruins it by rearing his animatronic head, looking even more phony than the actors.
In any case, the snake is not nearly as reptilian as Voight, who seems to have conceived Sarone as Ricky Ricardo's evil little nephew, and comes close to salvaging "Anaconda" by sneering the line, "Yo sink Ima soopid?" Well, since you asked.