Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

The latest in enhanced marketing techniques

Grade: B–

Director: Adam McKay

Starring: Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, David Koechner, Christina Applegate, Kristen Wiig, James Marsden and Meagan Good

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 59 min.

When last we saw Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell), that polyester paragon of old school TV news, he was resisting the changing feminine face of his medium in the 1970s. In Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, he’s among the vanguard of the all-day news network and the ultimate dumbing-down of that same medium. That premise makes for a good half-hour or so of script material; the rest of Anchorman 2 is the sort of extraneous padding that comedic performers like Ferrell and Adam Sandler ultimately have the unfortunate clout to foist into their movies.

Ousted from his NYC anchor’s chair alongside his wife Veronica (Christina Applegate), Ron lands a job working the graveyard shift at GNN, the nation’s first 24-hour news channel. Locked in a ratings battle with fellow anchor Jack Lime (James Marden), the network’s prime time prima donna, Ron stumbles onto the notion of telling people “the news they want to hear” instead of “the news they need to hear.” So, Ron’s teleprompter gets filled with pap about kittens, car chases and, above all, “America,” all accented by a dizzying array of onscreen graphics. Dimwitted weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) moves outdoors, where every strong breeze is conflated into a deadly maelstrom. Loutish sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner) shows nothing but a highlight reel full of home runs and hard tackles (“and NO soccer,” Ron demands), all punctuated by his catchphrase “Whammy!” And beat reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) logs stories about strip clubs and, well, “America.”

This sardonic framework culminates during the film’s final act with a madcap battle royale between various spinoff news channels, a parade of horribles embodying the media oversaturation that Ron’s bright idea would ultimately bring about. The scene’s cavalcade of cameos might smack of a narrative crutch. But, it breaks the monotony and, in the case of an appearance by a certain Canadian comedian, shows what a true physical funnyman can do with even the barest material.

Unfortunately, it’s also a scene that encapsulates everything good and banal about Anchorman 2. While the specter of a fight to the death between warring tribes from the BBC, MTV, E! and History Channel is hilarious, the incongruous inclusion of a werewolf, minotaur and the ghost of Stonewall Jackson is the sort of pointless surreality that populates rest of the film.

Too much time is spent on what Brick, Champ and Brian were doing with their lives before Ron gets the band back together. Same with an utterly unfunny subplot involving Brick’s non sequitur-filled flirtations with fellow oddball Chani (Kristen Wiig)—a little Brick goes a LONG way. When Ron is abruptly afflicted with blindness (too complicated to explain here), Ferrell’s otherwise droll portrayal of Ron’s self-pity party strays into stagnant waters, particularly when Ron and his son nurse-feed an injured shark they name Doby back to health. Even the structure of two verbal gags was lifted from the Austin Powers movies.

And then there are the lunkheaded attempts at off-color humor, which Ferrell and director Adam McKay include without an ounce of wit. Hearing Ron, Champ and others constantly refer to “blacks,” “Mexicans,” “lesbians,” and “Jews” isn’t brazenly non-PC, it’s just uncomfortably icky without sufficient satirical context. The ebb is Ron’s affair with Linda (Meagan Good), his feisty African-American producer, mined for race-centric riffs that include a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner scene in which Ron adopts an exaggerated black-cent in order to communicate with Linda’s otherwise erudite family.

Anchorman 2 is 15 minutes longer than its predecessor, but it feels like 50. Trimming a half-hour of self-indulgence would have left a solid, even subversive satire. As it is, this is one anchorman that desperately needs a copy editor.

The Other Guys

Either jump or don't jump...my chocolate mint is melting

Grade: B

Director: Adam McKay

Starring: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, and Steve Googan

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

If nothing else, The Other Guys demonstrates how Will Ferrell can perpetuate his comedic film career. His character, NYPD desk-jockey Allen Gamble, is a milquetoast variant of Ferrell’s typical buffoonish man-child, sans the conflated pomposity and loutishness that fueled roles in Anchorman and (the overrated) Talladega Nights but had grown increasingly irksome in the lackluster Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and Step Brothers.

To wit, Allen is a schmo who takes a job as a police forensic accountant and wiles away his days filing paperwork because it is the farthest thing from his previous job as a college campus pimp named “Gator.” He takes illogical pains to downplay the patent, stunning beauty of his physician wife (Eva Mendes). He drives a red Prius and cranks Little River Band to get his adventurous juices flowing.

Indeed, riffing on tropes is the overarching theme of The Other Guys, which opens with the Wile E. Coyote, pseudo-heroics of two shades-and-leather-coat-wearing, muscle car-driving bad boy supercops, portrayed terrifically by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson (prequel, please?). On the other side of the squad room are Allen and his partner Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg), a hothead who was busted down to desk-duty after an unfortunate incident that earned him the nickname “Yankee Clipper.”

Allen and Terry soon set out to earn their piece of precinct cred by cracking an elaborate white-collar caper hatched by Wall St. jillionaire David Ershon (Steve Googan). Hamstringing them throughout is crippling social ineptitude, Terry’s active distain for his partner, and the stock irascible police captain (Michael Keaton), albeit one who moonlights as a manager at Ben Bath & Beyond and harbors an unwitting penchant for quoting lyrics from TLC songs.

Yes, this is the buddy-cop spoof that Cop Out wanted to be. Director and longtime Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay knows how to strike just the right absurdist chord, blending a panoply of explosions and car crashes – and a gunfight that is a sly homage to John Woo – with scenes like an extended monologue in which Allen explains why tuna would win a war against lions (it’s as funny as it sounds). If Ferrell is playing partly against type, then Wahlberg falls headlong into it, riffing on his Oscar-nominated role from The Departed. And, there’s subtle satire in casting corporate villains instead of the stereotypical drugs-and-thugs sort, although the film unsuccessfully strains for import when it litters the closing credits with sundry real-life statistics about corporate greed and the widening wealth gap.

The laffs wane towards the end of The Other Guys, devolving into a series of callbacks to earlier gags – the film could have easily been trimmed by about 15 minutes – that keep it from reaching rarified Naked Gun air. Ferrell and Co. work best when they leave the arena of parody and embrace the bizarre, like Ferrell and Mendes’s dinner-table crooning of a ballad named “Pimps Don’t Cry” or Allen plowing through crime scene cadavers, coating his Prius in a sheet of cocaine in the process. Mindless comedy is rarely this knowing.

Neil Morris