Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

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Movie Details

• Genre: Comedy
• Release Date: 2004-07-09 Nationwide
• Running Time: 91 min.
• Director: Adam McKay
• Cast: Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Fred Willard, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, Vince Vaughn, Chris Parnell, Kathryn Hahn, Tara Subkoff, Kevin Corrigan
• Producer: Judd Apatow
• Writers: Will Ferrell, Adam McKay
• Official Site: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy Official Site

It's easy to see why Will Ferrell dreamed up the alter ego of Ron Burgundy, a helmet-haired horndog of a '70s newsman who's losing the sexual revolution to a female colleague (Christina Applegate) in the era of ERA. Wounded priapic pride is a shtick Ferrell has down to a science: His juiciest characters put the cheese in machismo, reacting to sissy-boy flashes of fear, sensitivity, and adult behavior like a bull moose overcompensating for antler droop. As Burgundy, torn between palling around with his polyester-clad cronies and taking his new rival seriously, Ferrell bellows in manly torment as if Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs were vying for his very soul. He's often very funny, as is his rainforest of second bananas--especially Paul Rudd as a studly proto-Geraldo and Steven Carell as an airhead weatherman who, pressed to name the great love of his life, stammers, "Carpet." Like most recent comedies by smart people with sketch-TV backgrounds, though, Anchorman expends its energy on gags-per-minute rather than a point of view. The result is a kind of lazy absurdism that renders the jokes weirdly toothless and irrelevant. Anything goes, all right, and some of it is sublime--like the news-crew rumble that mutates into a spot-on parody of Gangs of New York. (As a pipe-puffing PBS pledge-boy, Tim Robbins makes a riotous ringer for Bill the Butcher.) But what's this doing in a film about the decade of All the President's Men? The movie evaporates between gags, and the script by Ferrell and director Adam McKay squanders both the newsroom setting and the '70s angle. Indeed, for megaton yuks at the expense of dunce-cap anchors, the summer champ remains Fahrenheit 9/11. When Katie Couric gushes "Navy SEALs rock!" in the midst of war coverage, Ron Burgundy looks like Edward R. Murrow. (Jim Ridley)