A nice full-bodied Burgundy

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues joins the glorious pantheon of silver screen outings where the sequel outshines the original, slotting alongside names such as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, From Russia With Love and, er, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.  It wasn't that Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was a bad movie but it was bit hit-and-miss in terms of the gags.  Some hit the mark sweetly while others were obviously intended as funny but just fell flat.
Anchorman 2 (let's drop the Hollywood fashion for subtitles, though even this has been sent up here) skirts perilously close to some epic car-(or Winnebago-)crashes but always comes up with the goods - some are high-end, some are low-brow - consistently, it delivers.  It certainly has been a long time in gestation and I imagine Will Ferrell and his team have been notching up yoicks in notepads down the years to add to the brew and the film does across as as series of sketches.  Some skits in the trailer don't even make the final movie (mocking 1970s mainstream ignorance of homosexuality by associating a gay reporter with vampirism and Burgundy's dog being interpreted).  Yet there is also an exquisite satire play on CNN, Fox News and American news in general.  Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) comes to the conclusion, 300 years after Jonathan Swift, that "there's too much news."
Anchorman 2 scores highly on the number of cameo appearances made by A-list actors - the list runs and runs.  In addition to Burgundy's crew of Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), Champ Kind (David Koechner), plus Burgundy's wife in Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), there is Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear, James Marsden, Kristen Wiig, Sacha Baron Cohen, Marion Cotillard, Will Smith, Kirsten Dunst and, uncredited, Jim Carrey, Liam Neeson, John C. Reilly, Tina Fey, Vince Vaughn (with both his character's arms somehow reattached) and Kanye West. As the vast majority of these appear in one set-piece scene, the movie is not over-burdened by competing egos and it all adds to the fun as you enjoy recognising all the stars.
Burgundy's new boss is the Australian entrepreneur, Kench Allenby (Josh Lawson), a cross between Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, a man who has worked tirelessly his whole life to make $305 million from the $300 million he inherited from his father (a joke that works better on paper than it does on screen, as in most people's books making $5 million in a lifetime is pretty impressive).  Indeed, Burgundy is the man who led to the degenerating standards of American news, where Justin Bieber's drag-racing antics while under the influence of marijuana and prescription drugs merits top billing whereas people dying for their freedoms in the geo-strategic state of Ukraine struggles to get airtime.  As Burgundy declaims: "Why give people the news they need to hear?  Why not give them the news they want to hear?"  And by having  by signing off by wishing his audience, "A good night and an American night," the tawdry and affected patriotism skewers Fox News directly.
The 1970s fashion is as pleasing as anything in American Hustle that is making waves for how it has dressed its cast.    Ferrell even makes use of his training from Blades of Glory with a whimsicallly ridiculous ice-skating section.  Indeed, whimsy and nonsense is the guiding leitmotif, such as when Burgundy bottlefeeds a baby shark that he raises in a miniature artificial lagoon and this allows the pretty cutting satire to cruise under the radar (such as the fetish for car chase scenes where the anchor speculates wildly).  Anchorman 2 had all the ingredients that have led to unfunny disaster in other would-be comedies but for the large part it hangs together superbly.  It even rewards its fans with a post-credits sequence if you stay to the very end, as one would expect from such a film.  That's a respect one rarely gets in the audience.  I anticipate the DVD to see the extras.  4 out of 5.