** (out of ****)
Starring Jon Voight, Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, Kari Wuhrer, Owen Wilson, Vincent Castellanos, and Danny Trejo
Directed by Luis Llosa & written by Hans Bauer, Jim Cash, and Jack Epps Jr.
1997 PG13
Of course I knew this would be a bad movie. But the question is, would it be bad enough? Would “Anaconda” embrace its badness whole-heartedly? Would all the acting be over-the-top? Would the special effects be phony enough? Or would the pseudo-science be too much science and not enough pseudo?
“Anaconda” tells the tale of a UCLA film crew boating down the Amazon in search of…oh, I don’t know, a lost tribe or something. They’re played by Eric Stoltz, Jennifer Lopez, Jonathan Hyde, Ice Cube, Kari Wuhrer, and Owen Wilson, and their boat is operated by Vincent Castellanos. Along the way they pick up a Mysterious Stranger whose boat has broken down. He’s played by Jon Voight, who apparently has no luck when it comes to going down rivers. The film crew soon regrets helping the Mysterious Stranger, especially when he leads them into the realm of a giant man-eating snake. Mmmm…delicious people.
A combination of animatronics, computer images, and rubber hoses, the snake itself doesn’t look too bad…except when it’s wrapping itself around people, when it looks like a cartoon. My wife, who is really into reptiles, tells me that “Anaconda’s” anaconda even strikes like a real snake would, except slower. Of course it would never chase any prey the way the beast in this movie does, especially for days without end. A real snake will just find a nice hot rock and stay there until something succulent happens by, even if that takes a few weeks. But that would make for a pretty sorry adventure story.
“Anaconda” hits all the clichés eagerly anticipated by fans of horror and adventure movies. There’s a lot of needlessly expository dialogue near the beginning, in which characters greet one another by full name and occupation, for the audience’s benefit. The leader of the expedition is killed or disabled early on, to create a power vacuum, because movies like this are nothing without a yelling match among the survivors. J-Lo spends a lot of time in tight white clothes, usually drenched in sweat and liberated from the patriarchal confines of underwear. We get to see the boat, the river, and the adventurers from the snake’s perspective, which I hereby dub “Conda-Cam.” Some of these images prove to be just jerking us around, because the snake turns out to have been nowhere near where those shots took place. And the characters die in almost an exact reversal of the billing order, but not before delivering great lines such as these:
“Where’s so-and-so? I thought he was right behind me.”
“I think from now on we should all stay on the boat.”
“The radio’s dead!” (This is especially good because we never see what happens to it.)
“Do you hear that? The jungle just went silent!”
There’s also a bolt-action rifle that can be fired repeatedly without working the bolt, or giving off a muzzle flash, or even requiring J-Lo to move in any way like a gun has just discharged.
All these things I can appreciate and laugh at in a cold, intellectual manner, but somehow “Anaconda” never quite got my motor running. Plenty of theories exist on what makes some bad movies entertaining while others just suck. One theory contends that a bad movie has to be fully aware of its crappiness in order to entertain. Evidence for this theory include Mike Hodges’ “Flash Gordon” from 1980, which features Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton, Max von Sydow, and music by Queen (“Flash! He’s a miracle!”). This movie carries the tagline “Pathetic Earthlings, who can save you now?” and features priceless dialogue like “freeze, you bloody bastards!” The contrary theory of how to make an entertaining bad movie is that the film has to be completely oblivious to its own awfulness, and should instead be in deadly earnest. A prime example is Ed Wood’s deliriously repetitive “Glen or Glenda,” which despite being woefully incompetent is dead serious in making its case for transvestites.
There’s a lot to be said for these theories, but I think the simple fact of the matter is that bad movies need energy, and lots of it. They need to careen headlong and thoughtlessly toward an unknown, unplanned, and perhaps even incoherent conclusion. Compared to “Switchblade Sisters,” “The Scorpion King,” or my favorite bad movie of all time, “Big Trouble in Little China,” “Anaconda” is a little too lackluster. I like all the actors involved, and their combined repertoire includes “Pulp Fiction,” “Deliverance,” “Boyz N the Hood,” “Out of Sight,” “Rushmore,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Spy Kids,” and “The Mummy” (a much better example of relentless goofiness). I even like J-Lo as an actress, although some people have trouble watching her because her music persona is that of a ho-cake. Ice Cube gets in a good closing remark against one of the dying beasts, and also gets to say “hold on, I think I can blow it up” so that it rhymes with something as banal as “hold on while I answer the phone.”
But only Jon Voight seems completely in the spirit of things. His face holds the same pained grimace throughout the entire film, we see him sleeping with his eyes open just like a snake, and he speaks with an accent from nowhere. He piles on one gem after another like “the river can kill you in a thousand ways,” “never look in the eyes of someone you kill, they will haunt you forever,” and “five shots of whiskey is just an eye opener.” More of “Anaconda” needs to be like Voight. Director Luis Llosa (“Sniper”) gives us some neat touches, like sticking his camera down the snake’s throat so we can watch someone get swallowed, and a quick allusion to Werner Herzog’s wonderful “Fitzcarraldo” in which opera is played on the boat. But the spans in which I wasn’t laughing were a little too long. I certainly don’t hate “Anaconda,” but it’s not quite bad enough. Now I have a sudden urge to see “Flash Gordon” again.
P.S. “Anaconda’s” cinematography is splendid, with an impenetrably green jungle, broken only by cathedral-style shafts of light, and is the work of Bill Butler, who also photographed “Frailty” and “The Conversation.”
Finished May 28, 2003
Copyright (c) 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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