Anchorman 2:
The Legend Continues

It’s about 9 years later, and we find Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) and Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) are happily married and working as the weekend news anchors at the WBC television network. They think they are about to be promoted to the highly coveted and dreamed about nightly news anchor chairs, but the two are only half right.

Veronica is getting promoted, and Ron is getting fired, and it upsets the newsman so much that he leaves her. At the darkest moment in his downward spiral, Fred Schapp (Dylan Baker) appears to give Ron a chance to get back into the game. Fred wants to hire Ron to become an anchor at a brand new 24-hour news channel.

Now, the news team has reassembled to light the world on fire during the 2 AM to 5 AM time slot.

Will Ron fail, or will he revolutionize the news as we know it?

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is a funny movie, but it feels like Ferrell and the gang are inhibited by their own previous success and legend. Ferrell and co-writer/director Adam McKay are at their creative heights when exploring new territory, but feel compelled to bring back some of Anchorman’s greatest hits out of some sort of loyalty to hard core fans (or fear that they have to make the same movie again to be successful or maybe that is pressure from a movie studio looking to make tons of money by going back to the well again).

When exploring the changing workplace in the 1980’s, the evolution (or, according to some, the devolution) of news or Ron’s strange relationships with his family and African-Americans, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is the hilarious movie you have been waiting for. It’s much fresher.

David Koechner as Champ Kind is kind of along for the ride, but Paul Rudd as Brian Fantana gets to shine as the sexy investigative journalist who will surprise you with his career path over the past few years, and Steve Carell as Brick Tamland is ridiculously, outrageously insane in ways that make me feel he steals the movie.

However, the familiar rears its ugly head as Ferrell and McKay recreate scenes and ideas very similar to what we saw in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. If you pay attention, the structure of the story is almost identical, and the two just don’t know when to end the movie. To fit in one of those rehashes from the first one, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues stretches on for about 15 minutes more than it needs to, even if the cameos are funny enough to make you glad they did it again. However, the WOW factor of the cameos is all that big scene has going for it.

Also, when did Ron Burgundy become so crassly vulgar? It’s like lazy writing when Burgundy starts spouting profanities. One of the traits that made him such a unique character was the more imaginative ways he peppered his conversations with tougher, colorful language. It was more inventive. He used to keep it classy.

If Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is the movie you have been waiting for, don’t let me stop you. Maybe like the first one, it will get better and better with each viewing.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content, drug use, language and comic violence.