A nice little idea, Anaconda is about a couple of friends who win the rights to remake the “cult classic” (so-bad-it’s-good) 1997 Jennifer Lopez movie Anaconda and then find themselves up against a giant anaconda for real. This one, with Jack Black and Paul Rudd, seems somewhat unlikely to achieve the same status, neither good nor bad enough to do so.
David Fleming’s score is good fun: the opening track “The Anaconda Adventure” presents the two main ideas, a little earworm of a motif often heard on pan flutes and the like which creates a nice vision, and a longer-lined adventure theme which doesn’t stick in the memory as much but is well executed.
The three-note motif is everywhere as the score goes on – it’s clearly a bit tongue in cheek in its evocation of the rainforest in a 2020s context, but equally serves as a callback to how films set anywhere even vaguely exotic used to be scored – Fleming cleverly joining in with the various “meta” conceits of the film. Another of those is Black pitching the movie, starting to hum what the score might sound like, and Fleming orchestrating that and turning it into the actual score.
The action music, starting in the second half of “Ana in the Amazon” and dominating the last 20 minutes or so of the album, is very entertaining. The composer creates some pretty serious and effective suspense music but it’s when he lets loose on purer action that the score is at its most enjoyable – lots of ethnic instruments join in with the orchestra.
My favourite track is “EPK”, the main motif and adventure theme both getting good workouts and there’s a wonderful flavour from the ethnic touches. There are various satisfying bigger moments as the score nears its end, including a nice bossa nova action track “Snake n’ Bacon” and the sweeping, genuinely lovely Lion King-esque “The Harmony of Nature”.
Fleming scored a great big movie in 2025 and I wasn’t a great fan of that, but his other scores from the year are all impressive – I particularly liked Americana – and Anaconda is a good piece of work. While film composers don’t get to write music like this very often any more (this film’s nature allowing the exception), it’s nice to hear such a solid throwback to a more 1990s type of sound and Fleming pulls it off with some aplomb.
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