Anchorman, released 9 years ago — not so long for Supreme Court Judicial terms, but an eternity in the funny business — was a bizarro comedy artifact that almost existed unto itself, a satire on media and manliness and the ’70s that also took the time for trident-fights and musical numbers. Every scene bulged, stuffed with a murderer’s row of all-star improvisational actors and funny people. Onscreen, Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy was in the spotlight, a moron with turtlenecked fake gravitas who demonstrated precisely why the British call their Anchors ‘newsreaders’ and the patient zero case study proving Aqua-Velva and polyester combined with aerosol hair spray induce catastrophic brain damage. Behind the camera, Adam McKay, making his first feature after 7 years as head writer at the comedy crucible known as Saturday Night Live, was charging from TV to film like a bull coming out of the chute. It was weird and funny and stupidly clever, notable and quotable and also a bit of a mess — the film’s lack of plot and dead spaces often felt like the only wind to fill the film’s sails was yelling. A later release of a side-quel, Wake Up, Ron Burgundy!, composed entirely of trim and outtakes and discards — comedy sausage, essentially — didn’t help the feeling among those who didn’t anoint Anchorman a masterpiece of the new comedy that Anchorman was actually fairly low-grade comedy fodder with as much gristle and grease and air as meat.
Nine years is a long time as the world Tumblrs, and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is a comedy that feels like it was made to be enjoyed more in its atoms than its wholeness, a series of talk-show clips and undeleted scenes whirling in emptiness. Expect to have quotes from Anchorman 2 clogging Facebook; there will be .GIFs of Ron Burgundy hugging a shark or a certain Civil War spirit drinking souls or many other moments here as surely, and in the same volume, as there will be blood. But story is absent. It’s an astonishingly weak and cluttered sequel, even in our debased age. Many people wanted this follow-up in the worst way. That’s pretty much exactly what they got.
If there’s a certain kind of bad action film you’d deride as a videogame, some comedies make you feel like you’re over in a penny arcade playing Whac-a-Mole — gags and cameos and non-sequiturs popping up frantically every few seconds, buzzing and flashing, and occasionally there’s a lucky, buzzing brief moment where you connect and the film scores a laugh — but while I enjoyed maybe 8 of the thousand gags hurled at me in Anchorman 2, two hours of its flashing-light, bell-ringing hyperactivity felt like a steep price. And if some films are clogged with cameos, this one has arteriosclerosis.
And worse, it’s a loud, dumb Whac-a-Mole game that’s badly made, as McKay directs with the kind of laziness that makes a narcoleptic Sandler/Dugan failure or a shot-on-mud Farrelly Brothers excretion look like The Shining or Fantastic Mr. Fox. The editing and camerawork are below the basic standards of introductory film school classes, never mind Anchorman. There are pre- and -postproduction mis-matches between punchlines and/or shots of cameos here as bad as the green-screen in Arrested Development‘s fourth season. The script traps the charismatic Megan Good in a play-by-play dead-souled repeat of the first film’s comedy and conflict about women’s liberation (to use the phrase of the time) that this time tries to mine race for laughs instead of gender and bombs.
There’s a dim outline of a faint aura of satire faintly visible below the excess and flab in Anchorman 2: Ron Burgundy and his cohorts Brick Tamland (a overmodulated, over-used Steve Carell), Champ Kind (David Koechner, wasted) and Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd, also wasted) are hired by early-80’s 24-Hour news channel GNN. Stuck on the graveyard shift, they inadvertently invent Fox News, Buzzfeed, ESPN-style 4-box sports shouting and YouTube kitten vids. They’re giving people the worst kind of non-news as natural extensions of their own stupidity on a global stage, and they discover a real audience among the cranks, ER denizens and others in their pre-dawn demo. They get promoted after scoring blockbuster ratings for GNN’s Australian CEO Kench Allenby (Josh Lawson) — a media mogul also who spikes stories that might imperil his corporate empire, with any resemblance to Rupert Murdoch as deliberate as it is unexplored.
But let me here briefly praise McKay: If Anchorman 2 had stuck to that plot — or any plot — It’d possibly be among the Ferrell-McKay collaborations I really do laugh at and appreciate for both their weird comedy bits and the story they tell. But among their films, I actually far prefer Talladega Nights — with its race-and-redemption arc providing a semblance of a plot — to the too-slapdash Anchorman, the sharply smart The Other Guys to the somnambulant Step-Brothers. Anchorman 2‘s insistence on quantity over context pulverizes the movie and your brain until it’s just a few sparse truly funny jokes and actually well-done comedy acting scattered as sparsely and lonely as dust in the vacuum of space, if the vacuum of space had weak, cheap cinematography and sounded exactly like Will Ferrell shouting random noises, forever and ever.
During the films’ pre-release promotional tour — which has been, to all evidence and coverage, better-executed, more cohesive and more deliberately planned than the very film it promotes — Ferrell was in Australia doing interviews and highjacking ‘news’ programs. He was asked not about Anchorman 2, but rather if there could be an Anchorman 2.5 along the lines of Wake Up Ron Burgundy! — presumably actually talking about Anchorman 2 would have been too grim to contemplate. Ferrell enthusiastically noted how “there could be a whole other movie. There are 230 jokes that you could put into a recut of the movie.” David Koechner, speaking about as many words as he gets to say in Anchorman 2, then followed up: “He’s not joking. McKay has gone through it. Somebody has counted.” Congratulations to Mr. McKay on the carefully-enumerated little list of 230 extra Anchorman 2 jokes he can turn into Anchorman 2.5; perhaps in some monkeys-on-keyboards/ I-Ching coin/Tarot Cards random way it’ll have a great story with plenty of jokes. But even if that miracle happens and the alternate footage grows into a brilliant flower of comedy moviemaking, then maybe the self-indulgent, lazy, ramshackle coarse-ground comedy compost that makes up Anchorman 2 will have been good for something after all.