McKay: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)

Successes as effortless and unexpected as the original Anchorman film are often the most difficult to replicate. Add to that the fact that the original film effectively contained its own sequel – the collection of out-takes that were pieced together to form Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie – and the current trend for late 70s/early 80s period nostalgia and there’s something overwhelmingly exhausted about Anchorman 2. Set at the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, it sees Ron and the gang travel to New York, where, under the auspices of GNN – the Global News Network – they manage to restart their careers with a revolutionary idea: give the people what they want to hear. Not only is the result as heavy-handed as it sounds, but there’s something about the GNN agenda that’s too close to the film’s own – every single moment is too anxious to recall and outdo the original, too anxious to give us more of the intense quotability and memorability that was originally the result of Ferrell’s brilliant improvisation rather than any master plan (and it feels like Ferrell improvises less here than in any of his recent films). That’s not to say there aren’t some great one-liners, or that it’s not comforting to see these old characters again – even if Steve Carell’s meteoric rise over the last decade means that it’s a bit more Brick-heavy than it needs to be. Nor is it to say that it’s any less distinctive than the original film, since, about two-thirds of the way through, it finally collapses under the burden of its ambitions into something quite different: a miniature film, or film-within-a-film, in which Ron’s struck with blindness and retreats to a rocky New England lighthouse. Of course it ends happily, and of course it’s partly played for laughs, but it’s also a brilliant, affectionate parody of such 1970s weepies as Love Story, The Way We Were, A Star Is Born and The Champ - melodramas that fused the sublime and the ridiculous, discovering the most extravagant depths of emotion in the extravagances of 70s fashion, décor and mise-en-scene. Not that far removed from Will Ferrell's affectionate parody of the 70s melodramatic miniseries in The Spoils of Poynton, it’s the perfect register for a film that’s lampooning the late 70s but also somewhat melodramatic in its desperation to reach out to a Frat Pack audience that’s not quite what it was a decade ago. And so its playful nostalgia for the 70s conceals a quite painful nostalgia for the 00s – even if it ends with Ron Burgundy triumphing once again, it’s suffused with an overwhelming, bittersweet acceptance that his decade has passed.