'Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues' review by Captain Raptor
Almost ten years ago, a simple, lighthearted and idiosyncratic film about a dumb newsreader ascended the steps leading to cult comedy status. It launched several careers and its seemingly inexhaustible supply of quotable lines must have kept about a thousand t-shirt companies in business. I'm in a conglomerate of many when I say that Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is one of 21st century Hollywood's greatest comedies, but was a belated comeback such a good idea?
Well, despite how long the gang have been away, they are for the most part still on-form. Steve Carell is absolutely fantastic once again as the impossibly stupid weatherman Brick; he's the opposite of deadpan, mugging and screaming at regular intervals as well as blurting out with the hilariously nonsensical quips for which his characters is known. He stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cast, although David Koechner has managed to improve his delivery. Unfortunately, Will Ferrell's performance has turned a little overbearing and weaker over the years, but he's still got the spark that originally ignited Anchorman's flame. The old elements work just about as well as they used to - the group dynamic is as strong as ever and the exclamations and one-liners are still gleefully daft and unpredictable - but most of the sequel's new ingredients simply don't work. There's no comedy to be garnered from James Marsden's slick antagonist or from a brief, almost entirely needless Harrison Ford cameo, and there is one truly awful scene which essentially just consists of Ron being inadvertently racist for a grueling five minutes. There is one brand new addition that works, and that is Kristen Wiig as a female equivalent and love interest of Brick, because it is very hard for anything pertaining to Brick to be anything less than side-splitting.
There are some fantastic new lines ("chickens of the cave" is a phrase destined to be parroted on forums and t-shirts for a good few years) but there are no scenes of laugh-out-loud hilarity, and a couple of jokes have been transplanted from the original into the sequel. It's a hit-and-miss affair, more a sequence of loosely related scenes than a fully-fledged film, and a lot of the components (a blindingly unsubtle satirisation of Rupert Murdoch and sensationalization in the media, an abundance of jokes about hair, the aforementioned race relations debacle) just fall flat on their face. Maybe it was deliberate or maybe Ferrell and Adam McKay just ran out of ideas, but by the end things have descended into total chaos, and the final twenty minutes feature numerous explosions, cameos by a veritable pantheon of celebrities from Liam Neeson to Kanye West, and Ron going blind in a lighthouse whilst trying to raise a shark as his own. Some of these parts are funny, but the incoherence of it all does not escape unnoticed, and the lines between enjoyably daft flight of fancy and plain stupidity through overkill become incredibly blurred.
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues could have been absolutely terrible, and maybe it's an impressive enough feat that it wasn't. It's a fully watchable and genuinely very funny movie, but it can't match up to its predecessor and a lot of the material is quite simply just bad. It's still good enough to not be disappointing and if you liked the first film then I suspect that you'll like this one too. Maybe it couldn't equal the brilliance of what came before it, but it's entertaining and worth a watch. Looks like Ron Burgundy stayed classy after all.
Well, despite how long the gang have been away, they are for the most part still on-form. Steve Carell is absolutely fantastic once again as the impossibly stupid weatherman Brick; he's the opposite of deadpan, mugging and screaming at regular intervals as well as blurting out with the hilariously nonsensical quips for which his characters is known. He stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cast, although David Koechner has managed to improve his delivery. Unfortunately, Will Ferrell's performance has turned a little overbearing and weaker over the years, but he's still got the spark that originally ignited Anchorman's flame. The old elements work just about as well as they used to - the group dynamic is as strong as ever and the exclamations and one-liners are still gleefully daft and unpredictable - but most of the sequel's new ingredients simply don't work. There's no comedy to be garnered from James Marsden's slick antagonist or from a brief, almost entirely needless Harrison Ford cameo, and there is one truly awful scene which essentially just consists of Ron being inadvertently racist for a grueling five minutes. There is one brand new addition that works, and that is Kristen Wiig as a female equivalent and love interest of Brick, because it is very hard for anything pertaining to Brick to be anything less than side-splitting.
There are some fantastic new lines ("chickens of the cave" is a phrase destined to be parroted on forums and t-shirts for a good few years) but there are no scenes of laugh-out-loud hilarity, and a couple of jokes have been transplanted from the original into the sequel. It's a hit-and-miss affair, more a sequence of loosely related scenes than a fully-fledged film, and a lot of the components (a blindingly unsubtle satirisation of Rupert Murdoch and sensationalization in the media, an abundance of jokes about hair, the aforementioned race relations debacle) just fall flat on their face. Maybe it was deliberate or maybe Ferrell and Adam McKay just ran out of ideas, but by the end things have descended into total chaos, and the final twenty minutes feature numerous explosions, cameos by a veritable pantheon of celebrities from Liam Neeson to Kanye West, and Ron going blind in a lighthouse whilst trying to raise a shark as his own. Some of these parts are funny, but the incoherence of it all does not escape unnoticed, and the lines between enjoyably daft flight of fancy and plain stupidity through overkill become incredibly blurred.
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues could have been absolutely terrible, and maybe it's an impressive enough feat that it wasn't. It's a fully watchable and genuinely very funny movie, but it can't match up to its predecessor and a lot of the material is quite simply just bad. It's still good enough to not be disappointing and if you liked the first film then I suspect that you'll like this one too. Maybe it couldn't equal the brilliance of what came before it, but it's entertaining and worth a watch. Looks like Ron Burgundy stayed classy after all.
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