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Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, review
Posted on: 12/16/13
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The sequel to Anchorman is surprisingly funny, says Robbie Collin, as an unexpected satire of 24-hour news culture

 

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The first thing that surprises you about Anchorman 2, a new sequel to a decade-old Will Ferrell comedy, is that it makes you laugh quite as often as it does. The second, bigger surprise is why.

In the original Anchorman, we were introduced to Ron Burgundy, a coiffed and booming newscaster working in 1970s San Diego, whose idea of a journalistic coup was candid footage of a waterskiing squirrel. This follow-up is set 10 years later, when the newly founded rolling news channels were cottoning on to the power of what might be called the waterskiing squirrel model of broadcast journalism. In this context, Ferrell’s character looks less like a preening chump than some kind of media visionary, which means that Anchorman 2 operates – in its opening act, at least – as an unexpected satire of 24-hour news culture.

“Does the news have to be so boring?” Ron grumbles during an editorial meeting at GNN, the New York-based cable channel where he and his cronies from the first film – played again by David Koechner, Paul Rudd and Steve Carell – have been hired to work the graveyard shift. (Ron’s ambitious wife and former colleague, Veronica Corningstone, played by Christina Applegate, is now presenting on a rival network.)

“We need more graphics!” says Ron. “We already have quite a lot,” a technician replies, warily. But Ron gets his way, and his financial bulletins end up looking like he is trapped in the central reservation of a six-lane motorway for share prices. News, he insists, should be exciting: it should pander to viewers’ prejudices, broadcast live car-chases and tend towards either the cuddly or the coarse. The station acquiesces. Ratings, of course, go through the roof.

Has Ferrell decided, 10 years into a broadly fruitful Hollywood career, that his films had better start meaning something? Until recently, his work with director Adam McKay, who shares a writing credit here, has always been scrupulously stupid, but their last picture together, The Other Guys, featured a billion-dollar investment scam not unlike the one operated by Bernie Madoff, and we saw flickers of a social conscience at work.

Well, either way, the new material here is mostly funny, and the satiric arrows, frankfurter-thick as they are, find their targets more often than not. The fashions of the era, too, are brilliantly caricatured – although there is only a hair’s-breadth of silliness between the blaring ties and windproof hairstyles here and in American Hustle, David O. Russell’s 1970s-set caper film.

LIST: Ron Burgundy's memoir: the 15 best lines

Yet in the same way that old bands feel obliged to roll out their greatest hits in concert, Anchorman 2 retreads many of the first film’s jokes and ideas, and in these moments, it feels more like a schematic cash-grab. Old characters meet new matches, or at least vague doppelgängers: Ron finds a rival in a younger, more snappily dressed newscaster played by James Marsden, and the simple-minded weatherman Brick Tamland (Carell) falls in love with an even simpler-minded secretary played by Kristen Wiig.

Ferrell’s comic energy is fuelled by unpredictability, so jokes that pre-empt their own punchlines are hardly ideal, and accordingly, neither scenario delivers quite as many laughs as you might hope. Nor does a sequence in which Ron has dinner with his boss’s family, who are black, and tries to talk as he imagines black people might – although there are flashes of Sacha Baron Cohen-calibre cringe comedy here.

Happily the film finds its feet again in its third act, with a subplot so strange I half-suspect I dreamt it. (Recounting the details would only defuse them, but it involves blindness, a lighthouse and an orphaned shark.) The sequence isn’t pure Anchorman, but it is pure Ferrell, and brings the film in for a smooth landing. The legend loses something in the retelling, but what’s new here is mostly worth the trip.


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