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88A slick, scary, funny Creature Feature, beautifully photographed and splendidly acted in high adventure style.
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75Coil up with a tub of popcorn, get a stranglehold on your soda - this is a creepy, action-packed boat ride down a jungle river with lots of huge snakes dropping by for man-sized snacks.
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75An enjoyably cast, superbly shot, jolt-generating device...It isn't art, but it'll crush your bones.
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70A trashily entertaining reptilian version of ''Jaws'' set in the steaming heart of the Amazon rain forest.
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67Directed by Luis Llosa with all of the subtlety of a snake-oil salesman, is in the great tradition of cinematic cheese, as processed as Kraft Singles slices. [18 Apr 1997, p. 48]
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50The biggest flaw can be summed up in a short phrase: lack of excitement. Thrillers are supposed to be crammed with thrills (hence the name), but Anaconda is relatively barren of them.
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50Voight's performance -- one of the film's pure, trashy delights -- is all leer, sneer and macho swagger, while the rest of the actors feel like the disposable snake-fodder they are.
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50A silly and plodding "Jaws" rip-off about a 40-foot man-eating snake on the prowl in the Brazilian rain forest.
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40The movie provides a fair number of laughs, even if you can't help wondering how many of them were actually intentional.
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40Feels like "Alien" as directed by Jim Henson. And the suspense is restricted to mundane slasher-movie tactics, including the frequent use of a mobile camera (call it the ’condacam) that’s supposed to represent the snake’s point of view.
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40Jon Voight, the all-purpose villain, does a pretty good job of imitating Marlon Brando imitating a Paraguayan snake expert, but the rest of the players--including Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Vincent Castellanos, Jonathan Hyde, and Kari Wuhrer--seem to be in a hurry to pick up their checks.
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38In what is surely a tribute to the dazzling mediocrity of director Luis Llosa, the real jungle looks as bland as the fake jungle.
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30Quite unintentionally, director Luis Llosa and screenwriters Hans Bauer, Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. have crafted a howler; Anaconda, meant to be a nail-biting thriller, is a laugh-out-loud comedy.
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30Such a classic combination of feckless dramaturgy and rampant excess that giving way to giggles is the only sane response.
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30Mr. Whipple squeezing his Charmin is scarier than this phony baloney computer effects-driven anaconda.
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Although it's refreshing to see an action movie that doesn't pretend to be something it isn't, this frankness has a downside, because what the picture so unapologetically is isn't, in fact, much.
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25So desperate and silly that here and there, it's a lot of fun.
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20This film marks for Jon Voigt a concerted effort to unseat Christopher Walken in the competition for the Czarship of sneering, wheezing, Machiavellian, all-around weird guys. He spends much of his time standing around making a face like Beavis does when he's really freaked out.
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20Charmless, unfrightening, and even devoid of the requisite gratuitous nudity, Anaconda just plain bites.
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0If only director Luis Llosa and his cast could see the joke and seize upon it; instead, like its computer-morphed snake, the film doesn't have a clever bone in its body.