‘The Python Hunt’ Review: One Invasive Species Pursues Another in a Quirky Doc About Snake-Chasing Florida Tourists

In the criminally underrated Peacock comedy Killing It, the desperate protagonist (Craig Robinson) decides that the only way to make seed money for his start-up business is by participating in a python-hunting competition in the Florida Everglades. Over two seasons, herpetological misadventures and a scathing critique of the state of the American Dream ensue.

The audience for Killing It was sufficiently small — I’m not sure Peacock exactly canceled the show so much as the streamer simply forgot it existed — that the reaction to Xander Robin‘s new documentary The Python Hunt won’t simply be, “Oh! It’s a real-life Killing It!” 

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Like an invasive Burmese python, the storylines in The Python Hunt prove a little bit too squirmy and erratic for the documentary to come into a focus in a wholly satisfying way. But it’s still a wild and generally empathetic journey into the swamp of the American soul.

Burmese pythons have allegedly been taking over the Florida Everglades in recent years, wiping out entire species indigenous to the area. The state of Florida has taken multiple superficial steps to wipe out the pythons, including launching or encouraging contests like the Florida Python Challenge. For a small entry fee, neophytes and experts alike can spend 10 days tromping through swamps trying to catch the most and largest pythons, with the chance to win a $10,000 first-place prize. 

It’s a perfect contest for a documentary because it combines a deliriously photogenic event — David Bolen and Matt Clegg lead a cinematography team that lands some beautiful and freaky nighttime photography — with a ready-made quirky ensemble, all with higher immediate stakes than your typical spelling bee or hands-on-a-hardbody competition.

At 82, Anne recently lost her husband. In the name of protecting cuter species, she wants nothing more than to find a python and jab a knife through its head. As part of that quest to pith a python — Anne REALLY enjoys talking about “pithing” — she has enlisted the help of local guide Toby, a chaw-loving “eighth generation Florida cracker.”

For Richard, a science teacher from San Francisco, the competition is half vacation and half life-experience party. With a small cache of drugs, he’s determined to do better than last year, when he caught zero pythons.

Other contestants include Madison, a photogenic ex-Marine, and a three-generation family who you know will do well, because they clearly have higher priorities than being filmed for a documentary.

Those are all outsiders — invasive species themselves. Then there are the locals, who view the contest through a different gaze, including Jimbo, who initially sneers at the circus of it all but sees python-catching as a way to reconnect with his daughter, Shannon. Jimbo is about to learn some unsettling truths about the nature of the python problem, causing him to reexamine his entire relationship with Florida.

Producers here include Lance Oppenheim, whose HBO docuseries Ren Faire was one of last year’s bigger nonfiction TV successes and probably should have offered a closer template for The Python Hunt. Over and over again, my problem with The Python Hunt was not what’s onscreen in its 91-minute running time, but what ends up feeling thinly sketched or rushed-through. Burmese pythons very rarely bite off more than they can chew, but the filmmakers have here — not more than they could chew in a four-to-six hour TV series, just more than they can properly digest in 90 minutes.

Jimbo’s story is an all-over-the-place mixture of father-daughter bonding and low-motivation muckraking investigation as he begins to discover that maybe the pythons are scapegoats for bigger problems in the Glades. The things he’s learning are interesting and important and never fully cohere with the stories of the outsiders running around shining spotlights into the bushes looking for “periscoping” snakes. 

Anne, who would be played by June Squibb in the eventual narrative feature, has some poignance to her primary story — she’s a widow who seeks to fill the hole in her heart by putting holes in snakes — but she does more complaining than hunting and she’s mostly our point-of-entry for Toby. You look at Toby, with his straw hat and outsized physique, and think he’s going to be a Florida Man stereotype, only to learn that he’s a columnist for the local newspaper, a writer with the soul of a poet. He’s the documentary’s best character, but we have to keep going back to people like Richard, who isn’t interesting, but does have shrooms.

The competition seems to give the documentary structure, and Robin even adds on-screen chyrons resembling the classic graphing calculator “Snake” game to let us know each participant’s statistics, but the filmmakers focus primarily on less talented hunters. So “winning and losing” become secondary in a hurry and the doc keeps wandering off with local, amateur enthusiasts — for all of the mullets and drawls, the film is very good at not judging the natives, other than the one guy who keeps messing around with a poisonous cottonmouth — or Jimbo’s different Everglades tour groups. The digressions are interesting, but they come at the expense of momentum.

In its jittery, exhilarating moments of peak intensity, The Python Hunt resembles an episode of Cops, only with heroes you can actually root for and villains you can root for as well, assuming you like your bad guys wriggly and dead-eyed. You’ll come away thinking this is a perfect setting for an ongoing television series. And Killing It is still streaming on Peacock.