2004's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy was a delightful surprise, a perfect vehicle for Will Ferrell's non sequitur spouting sexist newsreader and a fine supporting cast of emerging comedic talent and old hands, most notably Seth Rogen had an almost invisible role as a cameraman, whilst the great Fred Willard stole every scene he was in as Ron's beleagured boss.


Now, nearly ten years later, there's a sequel and if there's one thing that's usually pretty lacklustre it's a comedy sequel. The best comedy sequels (Addams Family Values, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey) often succeed their original by having got the groundwork out of the way and plunge their characters into ever more ridiculous situations - summer camp and the afterlife respectively.


Here we find Ron (Will Ferrell) and his wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) as co-anchors in New York, there's a promotion to primetime in the offing and their boss (a largely pointless superstar cameo) gives the top job to Veronica and fires Ron. Instantly plunging him into depression, and back to San Diego to commentate on dolphin shows. He's "rescued" by Freddie Shapp (Dylan Baker) who hires him for a new concept: 24 hour news broadcasting.


So, Ron gets the old gang back together - Brick (Steve Carell), Brian (Paul Rudd) and Champ (David Koechner) - and they head to New York. Unfortunately, they're saddled with the graveyard shift and, following a misguided bet, need to get a huge ratings pull, so they decide to move away from serious news journalism into sensationalist garbage, and suddenly Ron's back on top.


Ultimately though the narrative is a loose framework to hang a succession of sketches and set-pieces, peppered by the nonsensical exclamations of Ron and co. Sadly, there's very little inspiration at work here, with the most memorable gags being limp re-treads of the first film's finest moments (jazz flute, the news team brawl) and all the off-the-wall lines feel like forced attempts at recapturing the free-wheeling magic of earlier remarks, e.g. "By the hymen of Olivia Newton John!"


Meanwhile the rest of Ron's news team have little to do, Rudd's Brian has to handle most of the exposition; Koechner's Champ is just a terrible creation, whilst this seemed like part of the joke in the original, here his interjections are annoying or awkward at best; Carell's Brick pushes his slow-witted character into rather uncomfortable territory, skirting precariously close to just mocking those with mental health issues.


Of the new cast members few get given much to do, James Marsden's rival anchor Jack Lime gets a pleasing breakdown following on from his bet with Ron; Meagan Good handles the entire dramatic arc of the movie excellently as Ron's producer Linda Jackson; Josh Lawson fluffs a prime opportunity to really put the put into Rupert Murdoch as channel boss Kench Allenby; and Kristen Wiig is almost entirely wasted and irrelevant as the "female Brick" Chani, a character that utterly lacks any sort of inspiration whatsoever, of course Brick has to date another Brick-type, that's funny... Sigh...


The plot very rarely finds room for imagination, and whilst the film isn't entirely devoid of laughs, they are mild snorts and titters rather than full blown howls and chortles. Perhaps a side-effect of the loose, improvised style that they used on the original and managed to capture lightning in a bottle (so much so that they edited an equally funny spin-off called Wake Up Ron Burgandy from deleted scenes) and this time around it just didn't happen. Or maybe they released the wrong version of the film, the director has said that there's going to be a version on the DVD with the same plot, but every single joke changed.


However, it's worse than that, whilst narrative isn't entirely important to a good comedy, pacing is, and this film is a slow, plodding two hours, rather than a brisk, lively 90-100 minutes (like the first film). Weirdly however the most successful element of the whole film is the moral message about journalistic integrity and how far we've strayed from that in our broadcast news outlets. Which is a great thing for a broad appeal film to stress, but not quite the reason one might head to see Anchorman 2!

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Readers who submit articles must agree to our terms of use. The content is the sole responsibility of the contributor and is unmoderated. But we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention. If you wish to complain about this article, contact us here