Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
I don’t know when the phrase “frat pack” was coined to describe the current crop of comic leading men, but sometime around the release of “Old School” would make sense. As I understand it, the pack’s charter members are Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller and Owen/Luke Wilson. They co-star together frequently and do cameos in each other’s movies, and their work skews heavily male. I’m not sure the moniker is all that clever or accurate: They all seem like guys who would have devoted their college years to comedy troupes or humor magazines rather than fraternities.
Anyway, I bring this up because “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” (2004) is the ultimate frat pack movie. And I’m not at all sure that’s a good thing. It stars Ferrell, and it’s loaded with cameos — Vaughn, Stiller and Luke Wilson appear, along with non-fratters Jack Black and Tim Robbins. (I guess Owen Wilson wasn’t available.) The problem with so many cameos is obvious: The scenes become more about the stunt factor than any inspired comic premise. A smackdown between rival news teams never really goes anywhere because it continuously tries to top itself with one cameo after another. Only Steve Carell, consistently the best thing in “Anchorman,” can save it.
The entirety of “Anchorman” gives off a boys-club vibe. Set at a San Diego news station in the 70s, it chronicles the breakup of an all-male news team as a woman is hired as a reporter and quickly ascends to co-anchor. Predictably, it mines humor from macho insecurity when the goofball guys are confronted with an ambitious, competent woman. But Ferrell and Adam McKay, his director and co-writer, seem to share John Belushi’s chauvinist views about women in comedy. Christina Applegate, as reporter Veronica Corningstone (a great name, like all the names in this movie), has to play it almost entirely straight. She’s the sane, levelheaded center around which all the wackiness swirls. And she’s the only woman with a significant role. The message is clear: Women are party poopers. They want us all to grow up and stop having fun.
I respond a lot better to the equal-opportunity comedy of a movie like “My Super Ex-Girlfriend.” It may spring, as Manohla Dargis pointed out in The New York Times, from similarly sexist cliches, but at least it allows the female actors the chance to have just as much fun as the guys.
Don’t get me wrong: “Anchorman” is funny. I laughed quite a bit. But it rarely soars into delirious hilarity. McKay is an emphatic director who never wants us to miss anything, and some of the biggest set pieces, like Ron Burgundy playing the jazz flute, oversell themselves. The movie is lean and moves along quickly, and yet the story never garners much momentum. It has the slapdash structure of “Caddyshack” but not the try-anything inspiration.
It was fun to see Ferrell go so broad — even when the movie starts to feel like an extended “Saturday Night Live” sketch, he’s never boring or repetitious. His level of commitment to his roles is impressive, even if his wide-eyed, high-voiced incredulity is the same from character to character. Certainly I think Ferrell and McKay will provide a good time with their NASCAR-themed follow-up, “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” even though their addiction to overlong titles with unecessary colons is enough to drive any writer crazy.
As for the frat pack, “Old School” remains by far their finest and funniest achievement.