After nearly two years of relentless hype, the sequel to Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Anchorman finally opens today. And after so much anticipation, it should come as little surprise the movie is pretty much a whopping thud of a disappointment. It meanders along for the better part of its 119 minutes straining through a generic plot, milking these characters for whatever laughs they have left in them, before coming to the only somewhat inspired climax, a ridiculous fight between rival news teams that features more cameos than a Vanity Fair Oscar party. But is it worth slugging through all the tedium for this one payoff? Well, it depends how bored you are when this thing starts making the inevitable cable rounds.
The plot is familiar generic, post-SNL movie fair. Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy finds himself out of the news biz when his wife (Christina Applegate) scores a big major network nightly news gig. He retreats to Sea World, which offers a few attempts at humor though only one (Burgundy tries to hang himself from a fluorescent light) that wins a real giggle. A new 24-hour news network is starting up, and they want to bring Burgundy out of retirement. He gets the band back together – Paul Rudd’s buckshot handsome investigative reporter, Brian Fantana; David Koechner’s xenophobic, yee-hawing Texan racist sportscaster, Champ Kind; and Steve Carell’s painfully bizarre weatherman, Brick Tamland. Each offers an opportunity for a one-line-y situational spoof (fried bats, cat pictures, a faked funeral), but these bits aren’t that funny, nor is the tumbling Winnebago scene you’ve probably seen a thousand times in the trailer. In New York, the old crew runs up against young, hot shot newscaster Jake Lime (James Marsden), and their new boss, Linda Jackson (Meagan Good). Both are comedic dry wells.
Jackson offers an opportunity for a string of cracks about African-Americans. After all, the anti-charm of Ron Burgundy is that he’s a character stuck in the amber of another American era, (a lingering 1970s chauvinism colliding with the early-1980s) when sexual harassment, racism, homophobia, drinking, and drugs all resonated very differently. One of Ferrell’s strategies with Burgundy is to ramp up his character’s political incorrectness, but that only produces a lot of knowing, dry laughter. For example, when Ferrell affects Blaxploitation film lingo at a dinner party with Jackson’s family, you sit back and think, “I recognize something of comedy there, but I’m not laughing.”
Where Anchorman 2’s era-based social commentary should have worked is in its lampooning of the 24-hour news cycle, laying at Burgundy’s feet the evolution of broadcast news into endless car chases, myopic political bickering, and overblown patriotism. But here the film is surprisingly preachy, and short on jokes. Another dud subplot involves Burgundy and his ex-wife, Applegate’s Veronica Corningstone, which offers opportunity for Ferrell to scores laughs by playing the role of an over-the-top dead beat dad. Here too his efforts feel uninspired; the familial stuff never quite gels until Burgundy ends up on the outs again, holed-up in remote lighthouse, raising a baby shark, and learning how to be a family.
In the lighthouse scenes we begin to see sparks of Ferrell’s brilliance, which are missing from the rest of the film. The new circumstances (no spoilers) allow him to tweak the Burgundy character in a way that inspires fresh ideas. Ferrell also uses his body in new ways, and his deft handling of physical comedy in a way that drives complete absurdities is one of his strengths as a comedic actor. That blend of physicality and hyper-absurdity is on display in the final newscaster showdown scene, which includes, among other completely bizarre and impossible to predict additions, John C. Reilly playing the Ghost of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. How we got there is impossible to explain, but it’s pretty darn funny. The only disappointment is that it took so long to get to these moments of pure, satisfying ridiculousness, though they are also reassuring. Ferrell hasn’t lost his genius. Perhaps it’s just Ron Burgundy who’s spent.
