With the holiday movie season pretty much being all about Avatar. So, for laughs, Sony Pictures decided to lean into that by cutting a Saturday Night Live-style trailer for its upcoming Anaconda movie starring Jack Black and Paul Rudd that spoofed James Cameron’s Papyrus blue font and gave us our first look at the return of Ice Cube.
While the final Anaconda trailer billed itself as “the comedy event of the season,” we’ve got to be honest, it did not deliver a good array of jokes that screamed, “I’ve gotta get a ticket to see this stat.” Granted, the SNL bit about Avatar was clever enough when you ignore that the sketch is eight years old, but all the supercuts to funny bits in the movie this time around were a bit on the stale side. Still, in the spirit of this being a legacy sequel heavy on the meta-ness of its existence, having us endure all the lukewarm bits of actors screaming at a CGI snake, and all to a shadowy silhouette reveal of Ice Cube as if it were a big reveal we didn’t get scooped on earlier this week, was a valiant effort to push the scale down further on how self-aware and silly this film promises to be.
The main thrust of this Anaconda movie sees a group of friends who grew up with the 1997 film endeavoring to recreate it. They say as much in the previous trailer, with Black belting out, “Let’s reboot Anaconda.” Somewhere down the line, their indie-style film goes screwy when their beat-by-beat recreation of the movie lands them in hot, snake-infested waters of their own. Thankfully, Ice Cube shows up at some point to help them out by handing Rudd a gun. We’ll have to wait and see if he puts it to good use. Joining Rudd and Black in this Tom Gormican-directed film are Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn, Daniela Melchior, and Selton Mello.
As mentioned up top, the “Ice Cube will return in Anaconda” of it all would’ve landed as a politely eyebrow-raising surprise had the actor not spilled the beans in a People magazine interview a couple days ago.
“It’s cool to do a cameo, to kind of make it go full circle in a way,” Ice Cube told People. “When they asked me to do it, when I knew the kind of movie they were doing, I jumped at it. I’m like, ‘This is something different. It’s cool.’ People probably get a kick out of me popping on the screen.”
Considering the last time we saw Ice Cube was in that atrocious War of the Worlds Prime Video movie, we’ll take what we can get on the road to rebuilding his image as an actor trying to be funny on purpose.
Anaconda opens in theaters on Christmas.
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