Film Review: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Director: Adam McKay

With most popular Hollywood films returning for sequels within just a couple of years of the original, its a surprise that it took 9 years for the story of Ron Burgundy to be revisited. The immensely random yet incredibly quotable original film achieved cult status after a slightly slow start at the box office and generally improved on future viewings. Lets hope the second is the same because on first viewing it completely lost its magic and had far too many cheap gags.

The News Team back together in New York

Rob Burgundy (Will Ferrell) learns that his wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) has been chosen to be the lead anchor at the TV station whilst he has been fired. After hitting rock-bottom he is hired by a new 24 hour news channel called GNN where he reunites the old group. They make their way to New York to try and rekindle their careers working the 2am graveyard shift against Jack Lime (James Marsden) who runs the primetime crew.

While the credits are rolling we can see that the sequel is already re-creating jokes from the first film with Ron Burgundy's infamous warm up routine before going on camera, but inevitably more puerile and louder. Which generally sets the tone for the rest of the movie as its generally the same sort of jokes as the first only done with more shouting, gurning and cruder material. Thats not to say there aren't quite a few funny moments for each of the cast members, a personal favourite being Brian Fantana and the ladykillers which was a tad more subtle, but as a whole a lot of the gags are more forgettable.

Another News Team Battle

Unfortunately I think Brick was a huge let-down, a bad caricature of the 2004 version who isn't actually in the original as much as you think. But he's in this one a lot and his random jokes start to fall flat as you become a bit sick of them. The addition of Kristen Wiig as Chani actually did add something as it gave him someone on his own level to bounce off. While Burgundy's love interest with African-American newscaster Linda Jackson (Meagan Good) was a needless sub-plot only included to add some ill-advised race jokes that seem to be repeated incase you didn't hear them first time.

The return of the throwdown between newscasters at first seemed a needless distraction but with many cameos and some quite funny stereotypes, including BBC news, it actually became quite one of the better parts of the movie. Another crude joke about BP again showed that the writing here could be witty and clever but before you could enjoy that one you were generally groaning at the next gag. To be fair, the film is exactly what you would expect, very similar to the first but on acid so there is more everything which isn't always good.

1.5/4 Still quotable but the magic is lost