Anchorman, a spoof of 1970s-era local news broadcasting provides precious few laughs and quite a bit of dead air. Will Ferrell’s recent rise to near Jim Carrey proportions is mystifying. He is best taken in the smaller doses that his former Saturday Night Live gig provided him. In Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the sight of him in a polyester suit with the helmet hair and ’70s sexist pig attitude gets tiresome almost immediately. Even worse are his fellow airhead co-workers: the macho beat reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), the cowboy-hatted sports guy Champ Kind (David Koechner), who has spent way too much time slapping male behinds, and the just-plain-dumb weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell).
While Christine Applegate’s ambitious new reporter Veronica Cornerstone shakes things up in the newsroom, the movie isn’t any more flattering when it comes to her character. She wants to ride the wave of women’s lib just to further her career, and only hesitates briefly about using her sex kitten side when Burgundy declares his love for her bodacious booty. Insulted that she has to cover a cat fashion show (one of the few funny bits in the movie), Cornerstone’s desire to make it in this boys’ club reminded me of Jane Fonda’s similar dilemma in the 1979 drama The China Syndrome. Of course that movie took television journalism a lot more seriously, although there was a bit of satire beneath the surface.
The scene where the other local news teams challenge Ron and the boys to a back alley brawl with several well known actors all-wigged out in cameo roles, is good for a few gruesome laughs, including a limb-removal chuckle. This movie also does the impossible: it gives Fred Willard a role — as the head of the newsroom — he can’t make funny.
This limp story, co-written and directed by former SNL head writer Adam McKay, is about as entertaining as a TV test pattern.