ShangLuda
Admirable film.
Usamah Harvey
The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
Casey Duggan
It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny
Mike LeMar
The whole way through this movie, I keep wondering how hungry this animal could possibly be for crying out loud after each of its victims. And hasn't anyone seen a real anaconda in a zoo??? Or even on Animal Planet? They're not THAT long... This movie highly exaggerates one's length. Also, at the climax, a snake wouldn't look the guy and girl over, then Jon Voight, and decide to go after HIM, instead, thinking revenge first for trying to capture it. After it gets blown up, I like how the film makers have it stay above water as it keeps coming after the girl with its entire head end on fire because it looks cool. Dip yourself under, you idiot!! I give this one a 2 instead of a 1 for its acting. It's not the worst movie I've seen.
Davis P
I mainly watched this because I love Jennifer Lopez movies. I always like seeing her act. Ice Cube joins her in this movie, and I liked him alright, not the best, but he was OK. Jon Voight was pretty good in this movie, he played his menacing character well. The special effects were iffy, some shots looked fake, while others were just fine, so like i said, it's iffy. I did enjoy the scene where Jon Voight's character was eaten, that was fun and cool to see. Owen Wilson didn't really work well in this movie, I didn't enjoy his acting at all. Hid acting seemed kinda fake and phoned in. I expected to hate every second of this movie, but I was surprisingly entertained by it, especially through about the last half an hour or so. Jennifer Lopez and her love interest had really great chemistry too, they worked well together and you could totally buy their romance. Overall, this movie did end up entertaining me, and I was very pleased with the ending and the outcome of everything. This movie is really just mindless fun. If you can overlook Owen Wilson and a few shots of bad CGI, I think you should enjoy it just fine. 7/10 for Anaconda (1997).
Matt_Layden
Let me tell you about a little film called Anaconda. I watched this film a dozen times as a kid, I loved monster flicks. Anaconda was bad, it was utterly bad, yet I've seen it more times than I want to admit. Now we visit it again, years later, so we can laugh at how ridiculous this film is. We open with Danny Trejo, for some reason they dubbed his lines. He doesn't speak English, but the voice the use is so much higher than what we all know to be the gravel voice of Trejo. Just something that I found funny.The monster effects are laughably bad at times and worse at others. When the snake is animatronic, the obviousness of it all makes it seems like a bad ride at universal. Then we have the CGI effects, which make the snake seem like it doesn't even belong on the screen. The first attack on a human, the entire thing looks like one giant blur. The first time we see the snake in general isn't with some Jaws like reveal, it's simply the thing slithering around in the jungle before it attacks a puma. No big reveal, no slow reveal...just the damn snake out in the open. In Ebert's review of the film, which is enthusiastically gave a thumbs up, he claims Jon Voight delivers a brave and slimy performance. That I can agree with, but I wouldn't necessarily call it a great performance. It's without a doubt, memorable, but in the campy way. He glares at almost everyone on the screen, his skin is slimy like a snake and immediately untrustworthy. No one else seems to think they are in a bad movie here. Voight seems to know this from the get go. Watch this film and then watch The Room and tell me the performances from them are not almost identical. Is he doing DeNiro? Is he doing Brando? Who the hell knows. It's one wacky performance, that much is a guarantee. This was one of the early Jennifer Lopez films that probably helped launch her career. Why? I don't know, she doesn't offer anything interesting here. Ice Cube and Owen Wilson play against their usual type, I don't think we've seen either of them in a monster flick since this one, Suffice to say, Anaconda is a bad film that boarders on being highly enjoyable. Sit back, laugh and enjoy the absurdity of Anaconda. If you take this film seriously...at all, even for one second, then you will utterly hate it.
MisterWhiplash
At one time Werner Herzog tried to bring opera/commerce to the jungles of the Amazon with his film Fitzcarraldo, which featured as its primary set piece a boat being dragged over a mountain side. Gone are those days; indeed fifteen years after that in 1997 audiences got just a quick scene of opera being blared in the jungle - this comes after Ice Cube's "hippity hop" has played, which actually isn't that bad - while Jon Voight hijacks a small boat of documentary filmmakers (through stealth) to hunt after giant snakes. So it goes.Anaconda was a movie I watched many times when it was on HBO. I probably recognized then it was trash, but it was highly watchable trash, with convincing performances (for what they're asked to do) and some high-grade cheesy lines and mannerisms. Seeing it again today, it holds up as a B-movie blow-out, and is dated mostly by its bad CGI of snakes and has one too many climaxes for comfort. It's one thing when Fatal Attraction does it, but this...It's highly mockable (i.e. Rifftrax took it on live this year), but perhaps the filmmakers knew it? The actors don't seem to, certainly not hapless Owen Wilson - or maybe Voight does, and in his way it's one of the few times, albeit in a total cartoonish performance where he has practically the same grimacing facial expression with Paraguaian accent from start to finish - and maybe that helps elevate it. It's still watchable... which is about the best to say about it, with some competent direction helping along the way - along with some befuddling choices like a Snake-POV camera.Maybe it's best today as a party movie: turn it on, have some brews, and laugh at how that snake just seems to keep coming back and back again (and if it's more than one giant snake, why is it such a big deal?) Oh well... sequels came of this as well.
