Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Anchorman 2 finds the news crew broken up and Ron Burgundy on top of New York news with his now wife, Veronica Corningstone. She gets offered the national slot and he gets fired. When he gets a job offer for a new 24 hour channel (‘GNN’), he seeks out his old San Diego (it’s pronounced ‘San-dee-AAHH-go’) team to get back on the air. The team come up with a sucessful ‘action news’ formula, but their quest for ratings comes at a cost.

If the first Anchorman is anything to go by, then this will probably get better over time. It bombards the viewer with so many jokes, quips and quirks that one simply can’t keep up. Still, on first viewing it’s funny despite perhaps not being quite as quotable as its predecessor.

Ferrell and crew are as funny and original as ever and it’s very entertaining to see what the crew are up to. Champ now deep fries bats and sells them in a fast food chicken place (‘it’s the chicken of the cave’); it was worth making the film just for this scene.

One problem. It’s too long. Yes its funny all the way through, but that’s just not enough to sustain its 2 hour runtime. I got tired of laughing. As I said before, it’s probably something that won’t matter so much on second viewing but for now I stand by this; I would have happily seen ten minutes shaved off.

That’s my only nitpick. Anchorman 2 is so carefully crafted to be purely funny it’s hard not to like it. This could be a classic, but as with all classics we just don’t know it yet. What’s certain is that McKay has made two comedies that are absolutely like no other.