Spoiler Warning

Sony’s new movie, “Anaconda,” is a reboot of the 1997 cult classic starring Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn and Thandiwe Newton as a group of friends trying to remake the original movie. The story is a very unique set-up for a reboot, and allows for the film to do its own thing.

While filming in the Amazon Rainforest, they hire a snake handler named Santiago (Selton Mello) and are joined by Ana (Daniela Melchior) who’s on the run from some men for initially unknown reasons.

Black is the standout out of the cast in terms of both acting and comedy. Things are constantly going wrong during production and Black plays his character, Doug, like he’s always on the edge of losing it.

Rudd is surprisingly unfunny in this movie. He plays a struggling actor named Griff, who’s sole claim to fame is being in four episodes of “S.W.A.T.”

The character screws up at almost every turn, from killing Santiago’s snake to shooting a cop who was in the process of saving the cast from the main non-snake villain. However, Rudd does a bad job playing off these moments, and comes off as kind of annoying.

Despite this, Rudd and the rest of the cast have great chemistry with each other. They all feel like friends that are making the movie just for the fun of it.

Doug and Riff joke with each other that their movie should be about more than just a big snake and should have “themes.” They throw out some ideas like intergenerational trauma and how gold mining destroys the Amazon Rainforest, eventually settling on the snake representing them and their friendship.

The whole movie is about friendship, but it’s also about a giant snake hunting down those friends.

The anaconda this film is named after is in this movie much less than the trailers would have you believe. The snake only starts hunting the cast around the halfway point, and a good amount of the deaths happen offscreen.

When the snake does appear on-screen, it does a pretty bad job at killing our main cast. The anaconda has Doug in its mouth at one point, but seemingly doesn’t chew or digest him at all when the audience sees him on the ground soon after.

Santiago mentions early in the film that an anaconda’s victims who die are the lucky ones, as they aren’t alive for when the snake comes back to finish them off.This never comes up again, and the main cast are very much the lucky ones since none of them die. They even get a selfie with Ice Cube.

While the snake is underwhelming, the cast is fun to watch throughout the movie and Black provides some great comedy. Anaconda is a decent way to spend 99 minutes.