The original Anchorman film is a cult classic, in which Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, the egotistical and misogynistic bequiffed newsreader on local 1970s Southern Californian television. Anchorman is one of those infinitely quotable films, littered with frat-boy lines and silly visual gags. It features a number of celebrity cameos from Ferrell's Holywood mates and an excellent performance from Steve Carrell. This new film comes almost 10 years after the first, set a similar time after the first and tells the story of Ron Burgundy's news team getting back together, fronting a 24 hour news TV station and accidentally coming up with all the tired tropes that constant news coverage bores us with in the modern age. Ron Burgundy invents the pointlessly patriotic news item, the heart-warming animal tale, the car chase from a copter, the news anchor desperately speculating about information they would have no way of knowing - all those things that Sky news does so well and have become so commonplace that they are accepted almost unthinkingly by a modern audience.
In terms of poking fun at modern news coverage, Anchorman 2 is on the mark. While the original film 10 years ago was more concerned with being a gag-infused caper about the character Ron Burgundy, this film is trying to be a bit more satirical. This is a good thing. Where the film goes wrong is that it isn't as funny as the original, over-does it with the celebrity cameos and quite often steps well beyond the bounds of what should be considered racist. Ron Burgundy is presented as a racist in the film, unable to cope with the idea of having a female black boss. When he meets her family we get an extended scene in which Burgundy is just about as racist as it's possible to be. Now though I get that it's the character who is a racist and not the film, and that we're supposed to be laughing at the character's awkward archaic attempts to ingratiate himself into a part of society he if frightened of - but this stuff goes on for ages and ages. If I wanted to cringe listening to old people's out of date racism I can go and talk to old people, I don't find it that funny to see Will Ferrell playing a character who does it too.
Anchorman 2 is a funny film, but I think fans of the original will end up wanting something else. It's a film that ends in a slightly odd way too. After nearly 90 minutes of silliness and bumbling around, Ron Burgundy has a mishap crowbarred into his life, goes into self-imposed isolation, nurses a baby shark to health (seriously), then discovers his love for family life and goes to his kid's piano recital. It feels like the writers wrote a bunch of silly sketches poking fun at Newscorp, then realised there wasn't any sort of pathos and so felt required to bolt something on to the end. Some of the funniest bits of the film involved Steve Carrell (again) and Kristen Wigg in their bumbling attempts to go on a date together. Even here though things are far from perfect. There was a moment of what looked like really bad editing, where Wigg appears to be about to crack up laughing at the end of a silly back-and-forth between her and Carrell, just before we cut away to a different angle. If that is the case then it's really sloppy editing, proper amateur stuff.
In conclusion, it's fairly good, but I doubt it will be a cult classic.
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