“Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” means to send up the early days of CNN, but I couldn’t help thinking of the launch of MSNBC. That network’s revolutionary idea when it began: to show repackaged reruns of old news clips. It didn’t catch on. “Anchorman 2” is like watching “Anchorman” being re-enacted by semi-professionals trying to cover up their lapses by being extra-emphatic, super-doofy: 2013 Steve Carell does a lousy impression of 2004 Steve Carell.
If playing 4.2 seconds of each of 25 lite-rock classics were funny, “Anchorman 2” would be a classic. Instead, after a long setup in which Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) loses the big network job to his now-wife, Veronica (Christina Applegate), there’s a grueling quarter of an hour or so of round-up-the-gang schtick. Together with former San Diegans Champ Kind (David Koechner), Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) and Brick Tamland (Carell), Ron hits 1980 New York and lands the overnight shift on the new Global News Network headed by a dodgy Australian mogul (Josh Lawson). The owner’s fun trait? He has an Aussie accent that no one can understand, for 10 seconds. Ron also has a new rival anchor (James Marsden), who starts quarrels with Ron by shouting across the room — twice, though it isn’t funny the first time.
“Anchorman” — one of the funniest films of the last decade — had a weak plot, but it had one: Ron’s war with feminism as embodied by Veronica. It also balanced Ron’s nearly forgivable childishness with semi-credible levels of thickness (Ron ending a declarative sentence with an upward tone because someone added a question mark to the Teleprompter) while tossing in inspired bits of surrealism such as the flute scene and the gang fight.
So guess what? All the best bits get reheated and served up lukewarm. There’s another quarrel with a bossy lady (Meagan Good), only this time she’s black. (Ron’s dialogue when he meets her? “Black, black, black.” He has dinner with her family and calls them “pipe-hittin’ bitches.”) There’s another flute solo, combined with a figure-skating scene recycled from “Blades of Glory.” And the gang fight? This time it’s much fightier. It’s epic! It’s got all kinds of wacky weapons! But it isn’t funny, despite cameos by half a dozen Oscar nominees, a music superstar and even a trident. Great Jehovah’s underpants, but in nine years, couldn’t they come up with some fresh gags?
Ron this time mostly just seems either idiotic or offensive, without the puppyish self-delusion, but Brick goes full cretin. He’s the 40-Year-Old Moron, spewing page after page of sub-Joey Tribbiani dialogue. Why would anyone employ him or his new ladylove, an office assistant played by Kristen Wiig who doesn’t know how to work a phone? Their special-ed affair is more pathetic than comic. And by the way: With Wiig on the payroll, the lead female roles are given to Meagan Good and Christina Applegate?
Apart from a few instances of cheery lunacy, most of which get beaten dead (such as a joke about a fried-chicken chain that saves money by serving bat), there’s only one really great scene, well into the second hour of a movie that should have been 25 minutes shorter. Stricken temporarily blind, Ron has an unusually difficult time managing: “I drank half a bottle of ketchup thinking it was Chateauneuf du Pape!” “You’re talking to a man who just this morning tried to brush his teeth with a live lobster!”
But it isn’t until that second hour that anything like a plot kicks in, with Ferrell and co-writer and director Adam McKay deciding that Ron Burgundy is the guy who invents but regrets sensationalism in news. Never mind that as satiric targets go, this one is about the size of Florida and as old as Gutenberg (whose first printing project, you’ll recall, was not breaking news but human interest). It’s just that poopy jokes and huffy face don’t go together. Either have your main character deliver a homily on the sanctity of journalism, or lovingly nurse a pet shark with a milk bottle. Not both.