‘Anaconda’ turned out to be a perfect Boxing Day watch: completely ridiculous, oddly charming, and very aware of its own silliness. The premise centres on a group of middle-aged men who once dreamed of making movies. Life got in the way, careers didn’t quite pan out, and now they realise they can’t let go of those youthful ambitions. So they travel from Buffalo to the jungle to shoot a shoestring reboot of the gloriously daft 1997 creature feature ‘Anaconda’.

The joke, of course, is that instead of making the film, they end up trapped inside an Anaconda movie – coming under attack from a real giant snake and even crossing paths with a proper Sony Pictures crew shooting a glossy remake of the original. There are fun cameos from the 1997 film, which I won’t spoil, and the whole thing recalls ‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’, where Nicolas Cage plays a version of himself inside his own filmography.

It’s a clever idea – but one that doesn’t quite sustain itself. Most of the best jokes are already in the trailer, and while the film gestures toward something heartfelt about unrealised dreams and middle-aged disappointment, it rarely digs very deep. Instead, it settles into being a fairly insipid but intermittently funny jungle adventure.

There’s also a generic subplot involving illegal gold-mining villains – the old idea that humans are the real monsters, not the snake – which feels disposable and unnecessary. The film would have been stronger if it had focused more on the emotional disjunction between who these characters wanted to be as teenagers and who they’ve become decades later.

There are echoes of ‘The Disaster Artist’ here – another film about chasing cinematic dreams long past their sell-by date – but ‘Anaconda’ never commits hard enough to being strange, daring, or truly self-lacerating. Like ‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’, the concept is sharper than the execution.

In the end, it’s cheesy, flaccid in places, knowingly silly, and entirely disposable. It passes the time, but it also undercuts its own critique of Hollywood recycling by doing exactly that. You come away thinking there was a more interesting film lurking in the opening scenes – one about perfectly functional lives that still feel unfulfilled – but instead, you get a limp trek through the Amazon with a very large snake.