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Will Ferrell

ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES directed by Adam McKay, written by Will Ferrell and McKay, with Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, David Koechner and Christina Applegate. A Paramount Pictures release. 118 minutes. Now playing. For venues and times, see Movies.


Will Ferrell does a couple of things really well.

One: he plays terrific assholes. Think of the hard-pressed father on SNL battling with his family over supper (“You don’t talk to me like that! I am a division manager! People are scared of me!”), the villainous Mugatu in Zoolander, or embodiment of evil Ashley Schaeffer, the drawling BMW salesman on HBO’s Eastbound & Down.

He’s also a consummate man-child, his Everyman charm and forgiving, schlubby physique investing characters in Step Brothers, Talladega Nights and Semi-Pro with a humanity they might not otherwise communicate.

Ron Burgundy, the preening newsman Ferrell brings out of retirement in the long-awaited Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, occupies the intersection of both these types. He’s the prick who’s also the nice guy, the asshole who always seems to mean well.

“Ron is always sticking his foot in his mouth,” says Ferrell on the phone during the film’s publicity tour. “But it’s really a function of his insecurity. That’s what audiences kind of connect with. He’s kind of a sweet character even though, if you look on paper at the things he’s saying, it’s, like, ‘Uh….’ With a different actor or a different performance, it might be construed differently.”

While this sort of character has become boringly de rigueur in contemporary comedy (see Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David, Eastbound & Down’s Kenny Powers, the diminishing returns of the Hangover trilogy), Ferrell manages to keep Burgundy from seeming like a warmed-over rehash of a character we’ve seen many times before (and certainly 100 times since the original Anchorman).

It helps that he and co-writer/director Adam McKay seem to take pleasure in punishing Burgundy in a their new sequel, which sends him spiralling to new lows. Anchorman 2 even contains an extended sequence where Burgundy goes blind and exiles himself to a seaside lighthouse like a maritime Howard Hughes.

“I was driving one day, and I called Adam and said, ‘Shouldn’t Ron go blind?'” Ferrell explains. “And Adam said, ‘Absolutely he should!’ That’s how we work. We think of the bullet points and then worry about how to get there.”

It’s that sort of lackadaisical approach to plotting that defines Anchorman 2, just as it did the original. Like its 2004 predecessor, Anchorman 2 is always most itself when its core foursome – the powerhouse news team of Burgundy, Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) and Champ Kind (David Koechner) – are hanging around improvising through period moustaches.

On-set improvising for the original Anchorman yielded enough material for a whole other film – the direct-to-DVD spiritual sequel Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie, a 93-minute film assembled entirely from footage swept up from the cutting-room floor. With Anchorman 2, because of digital technology, there was no worry about wasting film, which meant a first cut that clocked in at three and a half hours.

“Adam has an alternative cut,” explains Ferrell. “It follows the same storyline, but all the jokes are flipped out. So there are 230 new jokes just based on the improv. That’s something to look forward to.”

johns@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000

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