Seven years ago, a group of unheralded actors including Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Owen Wilson signed up for a movie about a group of documentary filmmakers on an expedition into the Amazon. Their voyage—like the movie itself—was doomed from the start by a giant snake, which had the unique ability to mutate between a rather unconvincing animatronic form and a laughably computer-generated one. Plus, they had to contend with the bad intentions of Jon Voight and his ridiculous Paraguayan accent.
Now the stars are back for this next installment, which takes them to Indonesia where ... Wait, what's that? Not a single one of the original cast members is back? Apparently these people are big stars now, with more important things to do, like, um, Gigli, and, uh, Torque.
The lack of big names actually helps the sequel, allowing it to work the way it's meant to: a B-movie with a B-cast. The results are suitably cheesy and occasionally entertaining. It's a notch above its predecessor, not so much for what it does, but for what it avoids.
Gone is the gratuitous sex scene with the bimbo. We don't have to endure Lopez clumsily falling into the water every five minutes, lest her shirt become dry. No Jon Voight with his silly accent. And the characters, while still stereotypes, are not uniform cannon fodder.
As for the snakes, well, CGI has come a long way in seven years. Not as far as Hollywood would like to believe, as the effects are no more menacing than the hyenas in The Exorcist prequel or the wolves in The Day After Tomorrow. But they've been upgraded from ludicrously inept to merely serviceable.
The acting is also bad, though you can hardly blame the stars when all they have to react to are blue screens and they're saddled with a terrible script (which had no less than seven different writers).
The real star of the movie is Kong, the spider monkey that's along for the ride. He's not only smarter than the humans, he's a better actor, too.