Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)
Directed by Adam McKay
With the 70s behind him, San Diego's top rated newsman, Ron Burgundy, returns to take New York's first 24-hour news channel by storm.
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Headhunted as the graveyard shift presenter for the first ever ongoing news channel, Burgundy programs for the lowest common denominator (like an executive from Sidney Lumet’s Network , but dumber and less calculating) and brings the ratings with him.
"Anchorman 2," written by Ferrell and his returning director, Adam McKay, strikes a few pointed blows against the current state of the media: The Aussie news mogul Kench Allenby (Josh Lawson) seems modeled on James Murdoch, the News Corporation heir, while Megan Good plays GNN executive Linda Jackson, whose appetite for ratings and sex recalls Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen in 1976's "Network."
It’s quite clearly a Network riff, but McKay never quite lands it.
(Imagine “Network” as directed by Mel Brooks, and starring Gene Wilder.)
And then you remember that Network predates even the time this is set in and things have only gotten much much worse since, and then you get even more depressed.
Yeah, one of the jokes rips off a classic Mike Myers bit from the “Austin Powers” movies, but it’s obvious that Ferrell is willing to “go there” for the sake of keeping in character as Ron Burgundy and Good ably plays along.
When cult hits rise to the top of the pop cultural swamp it’s customary for them to be go the way of Austin Powers.
At one point in “Anchorman 2,” Ron Burgundy bottle-nurses a shark back to help, and then gently sets it free in the wild, where it happily devours other fish to the strains of a “Born Free”-like ballad.
The anchor's retreat to a lighthouse after a second act tragedy is reminiscent of "Talladega Nights" in all the best ways.
When Ron’s getting feverishly patriotic, you can’t help but hear the echo of Jackie Moon (Semi Pro) or Ricky Bobby (Talladega Nights) and their barrage of ‘MERICA’; or when Ron dons ice skates the ghost of a tight fitting sequinned one-zee’s of Blades of Glory past come flashing into mind.
McKay and Ferrell’s big-screen collaborations ( Talladega Nights , Step Brothers , The Other Guys ) often manage both to be funny and, in the stretches between flights of inspired idiocy, to die.
It also proved to be the catalyst for a successful movie partnership between its then debut feature director, Adam McKay, and star, Will Ferrell, who went on to craft Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers , twomore films about memorably clueless men.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was the Will Ferrell comedy that did what the likes of Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory couldn’t; it broke out.
Like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell's previous collaboration with filmmaker Adam McKay, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby's few genuinely funny bits are wrapped up in an incredibly tedious, thoroughly predictable storyline.
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The movie does lack the freshness of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), which is to be expected, but it's remarkably consistent, clever and well-paced for such a long movie.
And worse, it’s a loud, dumb Whac-a-Mole game that’s badly made, as McKay directs with the kind of laziness that makes a narcoleptic Sandler/Dugan failure or a shot-on-mud Farrelly Brothers excretion look like The Shining or Fantastic Mr. Fox.