“Jaws” was a clever and terrifying movie because it had reasonable characters, it had a convincing monster and it was serious. Meanwhile this stupid rip-off has dumb characters, a very bad looking snake and comes off as rather corny.
“Anaconda” sets itself up really well but never delivers as we see a wildlife documentary film crew going into the Amazon searching for a lost tribe. They stumble upon dodgy Paul Serone (Jon Voight “Mission: Impossible”, “Transformers”), who secretly wants to use this ship and passengers to lure in a massive anaconda snake to catch it alive and become rich. After what seems like an eternity, we then find ourselves looking at badly filmed sections involving an awful looking snake eating people.
I actually enjoyed the performance from Jon Voight as the over the top snake hunter and I also appreciated the performance Jonathan Hyde (“Richie Rich”, “The Mummy”) as Warren Westridge but aside from them, the characters are really boring because they spout out stupid line after stupid line. The C.G. shots of the snake apparently cost at least tens of thousands for a second and I can safely say the filmmakers wasted their money; I’ve seen lots of films that have tons more special effects in it and they all look a hundred times more realistic than this.
“Anaconda” loses it when we see that it can’t deliver a satisfying creature and a decent group of characters. It’s a real shame as there was definitely potential to make a good film here as the prologue explains the giant snakes are a problem and we know wildlife documenters can sometimes run into problems. With films such as “Jaws”, the original “The Thing” and “Alien” why bother to see “Anaconda”? There isn’t one unless you feel you really have to see a snake film (it’s definitely a step up from “Snakes On A Plane”).
