The movie takes place after "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy." In that film, a woman named Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) is hired as an anchor for a local news station. This affects chauvinistic Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) and his friends. They think of women as nothing more than sex objects, and they do not want to lose their jobs.
At the end of that film, Burgundy and Corningstone end up together both as a couple and as co-anchors, which is where this film begins. They have now been co-anchors for several years, and they are married with one kid. Veronica has been doing such a good job that she gets promoted to prime time. Ron, however, gets fired for being a horrible anchor.
Time passes, and Ron starts working at Sea World. He is approached by a person who is starting something revolutionary: a news station that runs for 24 hours. The person wants Burgundy to gather a news team and work on this station, called Global News Network, or GNN.
He is told he can have anyone he wants on his team, so he goes cross country to gather his friends Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), Brick Tamland (Steve Carrell) and Champ Kind (David Koechner, "The Office").
Writing down the basic story premise is pretty difficult because there is a ton of stuff that goes on in it. This is funny at times, but at others it is kind of annoying to me. I believe the story was written as it was being filmed. It really does not feel like anything was planned out.
There is an episode of "South Park" that makes fun of how random "Family Guy's" writing is. In that episode, the writers of "Family Guy" are a group of manatees in a tank who drag some balls with writing on them to a certain spot. It ends up being a group of three or four balls, and whatever they say is what that particular scene is going to be about. For example, the phrases "Frank Sinatra," "eating a pizza," and "at the Louvre" are put together. The resulting scene would be one of the characters saying "That's as bad as the time I ate pizza with Frank Sinatra at the Louvre," and it would cut to a scene where that happens.
The reason I bring this up is I feel that is how the dialogue of this film was written. It is funny at first, but then I realized that all they are doing is shouting as much random stuff as they possibly can. Maybe if this was used sparingly it would be very comical. However, the entire movie is stuffed with crazy one liners that don't make a lot of sense.
The jokes are mostly a hit and miss. I did enjoy some of them. There is a gag involving bats that was pretty funny. There is also a scene at the end that is supposed to be a continuation of the battle among news reporters in the first film. That scene is really the highlight of this film, and there are some jokes in it that really worked.
This film tries to be satirical at parts, which is good, but it needed to go deeper into its satire. For example, it discusses a big problem with the way the news is run: it is sponsored by big companies. This is something that has been discussed among media professionals for a while. The problem with it is the news cannot report on certain things. An example of this problem is there was a scandal involving Disney hiring sex offenders as employees at Disneyland. The news that was owned by Disney could not report on this. The conglomeration of media ownership is lightly addressed in this movie, but it is such a small part that it could be easily missed.
The film also tries to joke about race. The first one gets away with telling very chauvinistic jokes about women, and I will admit I found those kind of funny. The way I justified this is the characters were sexist, and that is what made it comical. Maybe I matured a little since seeing that movie, but there is only one race-related joke I found funny. The rest was pretty uncomfortable to sit through.
Maybe I am a overly cynical about this movie, maybe I was spoiled by discovering Quentin Tarantino this year and maybe it is because I saw the movie after a long day at work, but I am going to rate this movie pretty low. In my opinion, it is not worth the price of admission unless you are a die hard fan of the first "Anchorman" movie. It is what my friend calls a 2:30 a.m. movie. That means it is the type of thing that is better really late at night when you are not thinking right and should be sleeping. My friend and I are Mormons, so that is why we do not say that it is the type of movie you can enjoy when you are drunk. For those of you reading this who are not Mormons, that is what type of movie this is.
I give it 1.5 out of 5 stars. Some of it is pretty funny, but it is not worth sitting through an entire movie of a poorly constructed plot and a poorly written script.
Content: Rated PG-13. There is some language throughout including one use of the F-word. There is quite a bit of sex-related humor including one mild sex scene. There is no nudity.
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