Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Will Ferrell’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues has Ron Burgundy (a vain news reader) trying to re-launch his career at a CNN-type network in the eighties, during which he accidentally invented the type of non-news that is now found on cable. This is actually a pretty good joke and might even be called “satirical” but only briefly. Then it keeps forgetting about itself, just as it keeps forgetting about Ron’s desire to get back with estranged wife Veronica Corning stone (Christina Applegate) and their cloyingly cute son Walter (named for Walter Cronkite and played by Judah Nelson).

Nothing in Anchorman 2 sticks around. It’s directed by Adam McKay, who made the original; it’s more slapped together than most movies by former Saturday Night Live stars; more so than most Will Ferrell films; certainly more so than Anchorman was itself, which was a bunch of heavily improvised bits that nevertheless seemed to be going somewhere because they were woven around the story of Ron and Veronica’s romance and professional rivalry.

Their bond collapses in this film’s opening scene, during which the duo are anchoring a weekend broadcast at a New York-based network in 1980. Their boss (Harrison Ford, amusingly menacing) tells them he’s retiring; Veronica will replace him and become the first female anchor in company history.

Ron is fired for being terrible at his job literally the worst anchor anyone has ever seen leaves her rather than live in her shadow, then goes through a mourning period before returning to New York and founding a 24-hour network modeled on both CNN (the format) and Fox News (tabloid mentality/brash Australian owner played by Josh Lawson). She becomes a non-presence what Applegate did for this character last time around was something wonderful so that he can be himself again, jamming his tonsils into the lens and bellowing nonsense while his GNN producer (Dylan Baker) looks on, aghast.

True, if they had made a movie about Ron competing with Veronica to heal his pride and regain her affections, it would have seemed like an unabashed imitation of “Anchorman.” But let’s be honest: That’s exactly what “The Legend Continues” is. Why not just say it? Many of the first film’s now-beloved (or notorious) set-pieces get repeated here: the jazz flute solo, Brian Fantana’s cologne collection (this time condoms), the bloody battle of the news teams (more participants, weirder weapons, more guest stars).

The sequel gives Ron two foils handsome but obnoxious rival anchor Jack Lime (James Marsden) and hotshot news director Linda Jackson (Meagan Good) but doesn’t develop either in a coherent way. Ron’s competition with Lime is poured into a single dumb bet whose punchline gets repeated but never gets any funnier. The tension between Ron and Linda, which flowers into a romance that neither the actors nor the film seem to believe in, is half-baked at best.

Linda Jackson makes zero sense as a character. She’s cagey, she’s impulsive, she finds Ron intolerable but wants to sleep with him and then be his lovey-dovey girlfriend? Huh? She also serves as the butt of jokes meant to send up Ron’s entitled white gayness’ (on first meeting her he keeps blurting out “black” over and over), but often feel like pretexts to have a white guy say racist things in front of black characters who are written in such a way as to prevent them from properly responding to his idiocy. Ron trying to talk jive at dinner with Linda’s strait-laced bourgeois family at one point using the phrase “pipe-hittin’ bitches” is this movie’s low point.

“Anchorman 2,” which is also co-written by Ferrell and McKay, lacks the original’s momentum. It only occasionally builds to the peaks of lunacy that you want and need from this sort of picture. It goes here, it goes there, it does this, it does that; occasionally it remembers that Ron has goals and desires and that the film needs to end at some point, so after 100 or so minutes, end it does. You could describe most W.C. Fields or Marx Brothers or Jerry Lewis movies the same way, of course.

But whereas in those great works of context-free clowning, or “Anchorman,” a modern classic of raucous silliness, most scenes and gags feel summoned from the head of Zeus rather than slapped together lazily, here too many bits play like placeholders, or worse filler. And there are too many reaction shots of characters saying things along the lines of “Why that’s ridiculous” or “You can’t do that!” the screen comedy version of trying to make a sentence more exciting by ending with an exclamation point! An exclamation point! Yes!

There are a handful of strong sequences.

The early part of the film where Ron rebuilds his news team on their way to GNN is a blast: Fantana (Steve Carell) is a hotshot photographer who at first seems like he should be a porn king but isn’t; Koechner’s sports guy, Champ Kind, is running a chain of chicken restaurants that don’t actually serve chicken, and chronically stupid weatherman Brick Tamland (Carell) is well, let’s not spoil it except to say that somebody involved with “Anchorman 2” has read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

And every once in a while the movie hands you a dandy one-off image or line, like the Patrick Nagel caricatures on the walls of the news team’s swingin’ bachelor pad, or the lovestruck banter between Brick and an equally dim office assistant played by Kristin Wiig. (“Last night a bird chased me and I wished it was you,” she tells him.) And there’s a sequence near the end that feels like the seed of a far richer, stranger sequel: A sendup of those corny ’80s ”inspirational” TV movies that viewers of a certain age will remember all too well, in which somebody overcomes some handicap after years of feeling sorry for himself. But these are just bright spots in a movie that amounts to little more than an off-brand “SNL” time-waster.

Watch Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues For Free On Gomovies.