Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)

Anchorman 2 arrives a decade after the original, which is roughly the interval required for a joke about a mustache to mature into a joke about a mustache with a mortgage. The film transplants Ron Burgundy to the dawn of the 24-hour cable news network, and in doing so it finds its most durable target: the corporate appetite for sensation. The satire of a Murdoch-shaped owner spiking a damaging airline story lands with a light anti-corporate edge, though the movie is careful never to let the critique interfere with a good sight gag. Ron's climactic on-air sermon, that news should inform instead of entertain, states a thesis and then flees the room before anyone can examine it. The picture has opinions. It simply refuses to sit with them.

The social instincts here are real but shallow. Veronica's promotion to the first female nightly anchor drives the opening act, and her success is filtered almost entirely through Ron's wounded vanity, which makes the point without ever quite making it. Meagan Good's Linda Jackson supplies the ensemble with a prominent Black romantic lead, and the dinner scene with her family extracts discomfort from racial friction using the blunt instruments of cringe comedy. Champ Kind carries the same closeted subtext the series has always treated as a punchline. Brick Tamland remains an eccentric simpleton whose romance with the equally odd Chani is staged for absurdity, not understanding.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. No climate concerns intrude upon the rehabilitated shark, who exists to be a prop and later a punchline. Body positivity does not appear. The period setting is affectionate recreation, not revision. The remainder is a comedy that brushes against contemporary sensibilities the way a party guest brushes against a lampshade: contact is made, nothing is disturbed. It is funny, frequently, and it means almost none of it.