Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Rating: Two and a half stars
Starring: Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, Steven Carell, David Koechner, Vince Vaughn. Written by Ferreall and Adam McKay. Directed by McKay.
Rated PG-13 for sexual humor, language and comic violence.

By AUSTIN O’CONNOR
Sun Staff
By now, it’s long since been official: Will Ferrell is on a roll. After movie successes with Old School and Elf, both of which became surprise hits last year due largely to the antics of the affable former Saturday Night Live comic, it seems like Ferrell can take just about any idea, however threadbare, and make it funny.
And in Anchorman, he is required to do just that. The movie spoofs the local news landscape of the 1970s, when anchormen ruled the airwaves. Back then, there was no such thing as 24-hour cable news, and precious few women had broken through the glass ceiling of broadcast news.
There were only anchormen like Ron Burgundy, the blissfully self-absorbed title character, played by Ferrell as a bundle of boozy attitude topped by an impeccably blown-dry bouffant. Burgundy rules the roost in San Diego, where he and his all-male news team have dominated the ratings for years.
Then along comes Veronica Corningstone, a rising star newswoman played by Christina Applegate. When she first shows up at a pool party, Burgundy ambles over to her in his open terrycloth robe and tries out a pick-up line: “I want to be on you.”
It says something about Burgundy’s character that he’s surprised when that line doesn’t work. It says more about the good will Ferrell has built up with movie audiences that he can take a moment like that and make it work. It’s hard to imagine another actor today pulling it off.
That’s not to say that Ferrell is the funniest comic actor in movies today, though he may well be. It’s just that he has a very particular sensibility, a talent for playing endearingly absurd characters who are completely clueless about their own ridiculousness. He did it in Elf, and he does it again here. They’re different characters, but Ferrell gives essentially the same performance, and he gets the same payoff.
Not that he doesn’t have any help in Anchorman. There are a trio of fine comedians who make up his news team: Daily Show vets David Koechner and Steve Carell play a latently homosexual sports reporter and a supremely stupid weatherman, respectively. It’s worth noting that Carell is making a name for himself by playing newsmen. His brief scene as a Tourette's-stricken newsreader stole Bruce Almighty from Jim Carrey last year, and he gets some of the biggest laughs here.
There is also Paul Rudd (Friends, Clueless), who completes the testosterone-fueled Ch. 4 news quartet as a studly star reporter who gets sent to cover the big news stories of the day, like the one about the local squirrel who has somehow learned how to water-ski.
It’s also worth noting that Anchorman is the second comedy of the summer, after Dodgeball, to feature a visual joke about a water-skiing squirrel. You see, people, these are the things I notice, and I pass along to you.
Mention of Dodgeball is apt, too, and not just because it shares with Anchorman a completely goofball, scattershot comic mood. It also shares a few stars. Vince Vaughn shows up here as a sleazy rival news anchor who, along with his own posse of reporters, squares off with Burgundy’s crew in street brawls that recall The Warriors.
And in one memorable scene, more than a few big name stars, including Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson and, I swear, Tim Robbins, show up as anchormen leading their own respective posses into a spontaneous street brawl.
Oh sure, there’s a stab at a plot — a romance between Burgundy and Corningstone, and then a rift when she’s made a co-anchor — but it’s a meager one. Mostly, Anchorman plays like a feature-length SNL skit, with as many dead spots as big laughs. With Ferrell on board, though, that’s not a fatal flaw: Ever since his SNL days, he’s been making things funny, even when they aren’t.
Austin O’Connor’s e-mail address is aoconnor@lowellsun.com.