Written by: Will Ferrell and Adam McKay
Director: Adam McKay
Review
If you want a wacky comedy full of laughs and randomness, then you should watch Airplane, Hot Shots or anything by Mel Brooks.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is a film that I did not watch until 2009, after its release in 2004. Not being a fan of Will Ferrell, I did not rush to see it, but after years of people quoting it and singing its praises I finally gave in and gave it a chance.
Now of course I am aware that you should not go into a film expecting great things after hearing a load of hype as you will invariably be disappointed, but even with this in mind, I was utterly let down.
Ten minutes in I was already thinking about switching off, but convinced myself to sit it through, trusting the rave reviews my friends had given it to be proven right.
Ninety-four minutes later I regretted my decision.
I understand that the idea of Will Ferrell’s films are to be wacky and silly, but that does not explain the complete disregard of the initial established introduction. The characters were inconsistent, the story was cliché and predictable and any decent ideas that they did have were underdone or ruined completely. Even in a wacky and random world, the inhabitants themselves need to be consistent to the rules that have been set out for them.
For example, the opening narration goes thusly:
There was a time, a time before cable. When the local anchorman reigned supreme. When people believed everything they heard on TV. This was an age when only men were allowed to read the news. And in San Diego, one anchorman was more man then the rest. His name was Ron Burgundy. He was like a god walking amongst mere mortals. He had a voice that could make a wolverine purr and suits so fine they made Sinatra look like a hobo. In other words, Ron Burgundy was the balls.
After hearing this, I expected to see a James Bond type character reading the news; a suave, sophisticated, intelligent man’s man. Instead I was ‘treated’ to an entire credit sequence showing various clips of Burgundy as a complete buffoon. In other words, Ron Burgundy was balls.
Maybe Will Ferrell could not create an intelligent, sophisticated character who was also a comic device. Maybe he did not think it was possible. Maybe he had never seen the likes of The Naked Gun or Blackadder. Whatever the reason, Ferrell was more comfortable in the ‘idiot’ role, the role he seems to have typecast himself in.
A lot of the jokes were along the lines of “Haha, he said a rude word,” or disjointed sentenced full of strings of ‘comedy words’. “I’ll have three fingers of Glenlivet, with a little bit of pepper… and some cheese” or “I’m gonna punch you in the ovary, that’s what I’m gonna do. A straight shot. Right to the babymaker.” There were also a lot of arguments in which the banter was ridiculously childish and non-witty; a lot of unoriginal lines cropped up.
I particularly resent the tone in which jokes and punch lines are delivered, which not so subliminally suggests that I am so supposed to find what they are saying amusing. Real comedy should not require this, it should work on its own merit. It is actually possible that some of these lines would have been funny had they been delivered by someone skilled.
In short, if you are hoping to be entertained by an original story, likeable characters and comedic genius, look elsewhere. Will Ferrell is not a talented man.
For further insight into how poor this film is look below, but expect spoilers.
Review with Spoilers
It is difficult to say what makes something funny, but pretty easy to tell what is not. This film clearly is not.
As I said before, the characters were inconsistent, which is a trait of poor shows, such as the series including Date Movie and Epic Movie. Randomness and wackiness is not the problem here, the problem is that the characters and their world were not established as such. Of course in a film, particularly comedy, you are expected to accept things that you wouldn’t usually. Steve Carell’s idiot character Brick should by no right have a job on a news show, but we allow it for the sake of the comedy, just like you accept that Laurel and Hardy manage to find jobs every week despite their awful work record. This is all right.
Completely changing a character from what they have been set up as from the beginning without reason is not.
Burgundy was introduced as a James Bond in the introductory voiceover, but failed to show it. The film continued with this theme with all of its characters.
Oddly however, the ‘Bond’-like character appeared in a few scenes. When Vince Vaughns rival news team appeared, Burgundy was able to put them down successfully with his smug words, which fit the character of the introduction, although the argument basically came down to a childish “we’re better than you”.
Burgundy appeared to be the amalgamation of three characters, the Bond, the buffoon and Ferrell as himself. The Bond appeared rarely, despite him being the character who should have been present throughout.
The buffoon took Bond’s leading role, and became increasingly irritating, especially with his ‘comedy voice’ which I suppose was meant to make the things he said funnier. One gag I’m sure Ferrell thoroughly enjoyed was “Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which of course in German means a whale’s vagina.” Ha ha, he said vagina… Saying vagina was needless. I would say the joke would have been funnier if he had said blowhole. The joke here should have been that he was pretending to be knowledgeable and failing, not that he said ‘vagina’. He could have got away with it if he said the more subtle blowhole. No one, even if they were an idiot would needlessly say vagina if they were trying to impress someone.
Ferrell as himself appeared in the scenes that required any emotion, the romance scenes and so on, speaking in his own voice, losing both accents he chose for Bond and buffoon. One particularly painful to watch scene took place after he loses his dog, and he calls the newsroom from a phone booth. The fake crying is too over the top, and not in a funny way, more like, in a really painful unfunny way followed by the quote “I’m in a glass case of emotion” delivered in that comedy style he favours that seems to suggest that it is supposed to be funny and could hopefully turn into a catchphrase. If it was delivered with real emotion, that could have been a funny line, but Ferrell is not the actor this character requires.
The films other characters also suffer from the major inconsistencies that the writers either did not think about or probably thought would be an amusing irony, but did not pull it off.
The news team is introduced individually. Paul Rudd (Mike from Friends) as Brian Fantana, is a ladies man, David Koechner (Todd Packer from The Office: An American Workplace) as Champ Kind is a chauvinistic, redneck sports nut with a cowboy hat and Steve Carell (The 40 Year Old Virgin from The Office) as Brick Tamland is put quite plainly a retard.
Throughout the film, Fantana displays little to no success with women completely disregarding his introduction. Champ, shows homosexual feelings of love towards Burgundy, despite the scene in which they explain that none of them understand the concept of love. Brick remains consistent throughout the film as a retard, apart from his introduction. When he speaks to the camera about himself he talks about himself and explains clearly that he has an IQ of 48 which means he is retarded. From that point on he becomes stiff, idiotic and speaks in short words, which works for the character description, but is an odd departure from how we saw him at the beginning of the film.
Christina Applegate is the final leading character, as Veronica Corningstone; one more who fails to keep true to their opening character description. We first meet her at a party where Ron tries to pick her up with the line “I want to be on you”. He fails spectacularly as she is not impressed, and neither am I… Bond would never have said that.
We next see her as, surprise, she joins the news team, much to every ones dismay. Although they all find her attractive and take turns hitting on her. An inner monologue/ narration explains that she is used to this sort of thing and does not let it get to her. She brushes off the advances of Brick, Champ and Fantana, but when Ron tries again and messes up she tells him that she expected more of him. At this point I question why she would possibly expect more from the man who said “I want to be on you.”
It is not long before she is inexplicably in love with the man and I am wondering where the strong, self reliant woman went.
Another major player is Ed Harken, the station manager played by Fred Willard. Unfortunately this role suffers from Willard’s phase of being in anything and phoning in his performance.
The rest of the film plays like a ‘spot the celebrity’ game in which we are invited to point and laugh at the familiar faces popping up in unusual places in strange outfits. Ben Stiller as a Spaniard! Ha ha no.
The plot goes pretty much like this: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy and girl break up for stupid reason, boy and girl reconcile. Yeah, that story you’ve seen a million times in pretty much every film; the story that is usually attached to another more interesting story.
In my opinion, more attention should have been paid to the news team rivalries, played out like gang warfare. That was an interesting concept, but they did nothing with it except tack it on as a joke. And that is all there is to say about that.
Another change I would have made would have been to the scene in which Burgundy speaks to his dog Baxter. I almost found this amusing, but they overloaded the scene with punch lines. What would have been better is if they had taken the separate jokes and dotted them throughout the film, instead of squeezing them all into one bit.
The title of the film is ‘The Legend of Ron Burgundy’. Nothing he did was at all legendary throughout his run of the mill romance story. He was introduced as San Diego’s number one news reporter but that was it. Unfortunately even this is not done well. We as viewers have no idea why he is the best, all we see are the bloopers and some audience responses to him being on screen.
I would have liked to see him show us that he was the best by watching one of his reports. Take Bruce Almighty for instance. Jim Carrey plays Bruce, a charming funny reporter who does not get the chance to prove himself as a serious reporter. We see this through actually watching him in action reporting a story. We are not told and expected to accept it by a narrator.
We are not then expected to continue to accept it despite watching a series of blunders and being let in on the knowledge that all he does is read from the autocue.
I found out after watching this that I had seen the ‘Unrated’ version with extra scenes. These scenes added more poo jokes and swearing that when I saw them seemed to be the scenes that fans would respond to most, although they did little for me. The best thing in them was the appearance of Christina Applegate’s side boob.
So to summarise, filmmakers need to read through the scripts after they have written them to see if they make sense and are actually funny before they go ahead and film them. Will Ferrell is not a talented man.
