From the Hootoo archive. Originally published September 16th 2004:
Sometimes someone seems to sneak up out of nowhere and becomes a star without anyone really noticing them doing it. I am, of course, thinking of Will Ferrell, whose career seemed to be going nowhere in particular only a couple of years ago. But on the back of some scene-stealing cameos in Old School and Starsky & Hutch, and a bona fide hit with Elf, his star is waxing and some are even hailing him as the new Jim Carrey.
This seems a rather harsh thing to say about anyone, especially when his new movie, Adam McKay’s Anchorman – The Legend of Ron Burgundy, is such good fun. This is another 70s-set romp in which Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, head honcho newsreader on a San Diego station. With his sidekicks Brian, Champ, and Brick, Ron rules the roost, master of all the news he surveys. But this changes when a need for a more diverse line-up forces management to hire perky new reporter Veronica (Christina Applegate) to join the team. Ron finds himself instantly drawn to her poise, her insight, and – more specifically – her lovely butt. But can they find true happiness together given that her ambition is to venture where no woman has gone before and – horror – actually read the news?
Well, it sounds a bit like we’re heading into rom-com territory and while this is broadly speaking true, don’t base your decision on whether or not to see Anchorman solely on that. More than any film I’ve seen in years, this is a throwback to the old Zucker-Abrahams movies like Airplane and The Naked Gun. It doesn’t have the same reliance on sight-gags and parody, but it is exuberantly silly and a tiny bit hit and miss. The opening of the movie, setting up the story, is actually a bit flat as the script has to trouble itself with establishing characters and suchlike. But with this done it perks up considerably.
Although on the face of it a story about relationship troubles and equality in the workplace, most of the humour has absolutely nothing to do with either of these things. One strongly gets the impression Ferrell, McKay, and the cast sat down and just spent a fortnight coming up with as many gags and bits of foolishness as they could and then wrote the script to accommodate the best ones. In this respect Anchorman is a bit like an extended series of sketches, some better than others. A lot of the stuff you may have seen in the trailer hasn’t made it into the final cut (a phenomenon that long-term readers may recall never fails to push my buttons), but the film is so episodic and loosely-structured that the disappearance of whole subplots isn’t at all obvious.
But the better ones are very funny indeed and few of them fail to at least raise a smile. This is broad, broad comedy, based around talking dogs, rival newsreaders duelling in the streets, and characters possessed of a quite breathtaking level of stupidity. The performances are… well, they’re not subtle, but then this isn’t a subtle film. Ferrell’s lead performance consists of shouting a lot and failing to be urbane. He’s well supported by a cast one suspects are improvising a lot, though there are some wonderful scripted gags too: one running joke about the station manager’s delinquent son struck me as particularly droll. As with Dodgeball, the sole major female character is saddled with all the straight lines, but Applegate does her best with this.
Anchorman is a bit more zany and scattershot in its approach than Dodgeball, but those suggesting that all modern Hollywood comedies are the product of the same tiny clique who all appear in each others’ movies will find some ammunition here, as virtually every star comedian in America (well, all the funny ones, anyway) cameos in Anchorman, along with an Oscar-winning actor best known for his serious roles. A lot of this seems a bit smug, given that the cameos themselves form part of the joke in the sequence where they occur, but it’s undeniably amusing: and one swiftly-rising star in particular shows a welcome sense of his own ridiculousness, if only for allowing an out-take to be used in which he displays a total inability to kick a stuffed dog over a three-foot fence.
This is another one of those comedies with no agenda or axe to grind beyond simply getting the audience to laugh. Well, once past that slightly slow start I was hooting like a loon for most of the movie. Anchorman is an enormously likeable film, unpretentious and with a formidable gags-per-minute workrate. Definitely worth a look if a healthy mixture of wackiness and smut appeals to you.
No Chic. Just Geek. 