Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues – Film Review

Washed-up TV news anchorman Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) is approached by Freddie Shapp (Dylan Baker) and offered career redemption with a job at GNN, the world’s first 24-hour news network. Gathering up his old team, sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner), roving reporter Brian Fontana (Paul Rudd) and weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), San Diego’s Burgundy heads to New York City to take the news channel by storm with his unorthodox brand of reporting.

In a two-hour running time, there’s an avalanche of hit-and-miss gags, but too many miss, and that could easily have been remedied by cutting back by 25 minutes of the footage to the first film’s length of 95 minutes. There’s a neat, nifty and indeed hilarious film buried inside this big and baggy one.

It seems pointless to complain about the sexism, racism, bad taste and innuendo in the screenplay by Ferrell and director Andy McKay, because that is of course the whole point of their gags. The blind jokes when Burgundy loses his sight and the jokes about his black female boss are just awful – Meagan Good has a truly rotten time as station manager Linda Jackson.

But Ferrell is on pretty much near his top form, re-creating the scene of his early performance triumph in style and energy. Koechner is funny too, for ever trying to attach himself to Burgundy, but Rudd seems uneasy this time, and Carell is just annoying in an idiot role, now just a raving loony. No one would hire these guys or keep them on the payroll for a second. So all the reality so carefully established in the first film is gone.

What’s the point then in making a media satire, and, for example, going for an attack on a Rupert Murdoch-style media mogul? Well, it’s just because you can. It’s scatter-gun humour. Shoot enough gags for long enough and some of them will surely hit the target.

Christina Applegate, so good in the first film as Burgundy’s nemesis (and now wife) Veronica Corningstone, is sidelined in a passive, charmless role. Greg Kinnear seems weary as her new love interest. But James Marsden does well enough as smarmy station golden boy Jack Lime, whom Burgundy challenges in a ratings war, with him renamed on screen as Jack Lame when he loses. (How weak is that?).

The count-the-celebrities star cameos are a waste of time (Sacha Baron Cohen is embarrassingly slack as a posh Brit) at the movie’s climax and guests like Harrison Ford don’t fit in well at all.

Burgundy hasn’t found a way to stay classy. Nevertheless Ferrell is a joy and some of the wisecracks are effortlessly funny, making for an adequate if uninspired sequel.

After the end credits finish, the movie returns to the scene where the news team scrambled for ideas for the graveyard shift.

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