I agree with Vince Vaughn.

Rating: 5/10 (27 January 2005)

I finally got around to watching Anchorman last night, one of the most popular and, as it turns out, overrated comedies released in 2004. I was just on vacation for 6 weeks and while I was away I watched lots of classic comedies, from Buster Keaton, the Three Stooges, and a few Shirley Temple shorts, and it seems that contemporary comedies have not learned anything from their ancestors. Buster Keaton remains untarnished in my mind, but the Three Stooges and Shirley Temple have both starred in films that are distantly below their talent level, but which continue to receive praise simply because they are early Three Stooges or Shirley Temple films.
As is also the case with some of their films (such as The Brideless Groom for the Three Stooges and Shirley Temple's awful War Babies, among a few others), Anchorman's creative growth seems to have stopped when Will Farrell signed on. Much stock is put into him in the lead role, and none into the content of the movie. There are times when the movie is very funny, but these times are to say the least outweighed by the stupidity in it, which is odd because the character whose role is stupidity is the funniest character in the film ("Mmmm! I just burned my tongue!"). Far more amusing than Will Farrell, from whom I have come to expect better than this. I have to say that I long for a comedy without poop jokes.
Christina Applegate is wildly miscast as the new Anchorwoman, an oxymoron is anyone at the news team has ever seen one, Veronica Corningstone, a respectable woman except that she occasionally transforms into stupid comedy fodder. We are introduced to a highly professional, well-dressed, intellectual newswoman with goals to become network anchor. Veronica summarily rejects the pitiful, frat-boy come-ons of the all male news team, which is amazing because who could resist something as charming as "I wanna be on you." Where the movie starts to really go wrong is that her character has no consistency whatsoever. Half the time she is pure professionalism, inspiring her colleagues to refer to her as such things as an "ice queen." The other half the time she is a breathless, steamy temptress, unable to resist the hairy Ron Burgundy, playing on Christina Applegate's iconography rather than what we have come to know about Veronica Corningstone.
Burgundy's colleagues are more interesting than he is, although the tremendous Will Farrell thankfully does give his character some weight, despite an almost paralyzing amount of stupidity festering in the script. Particularly amusing is Brick Tamland, who sometimes forgets his name but knows that someday someone will discover that he has an IQ of 48. The movie clearly doesn't have a lot to say about the intelligence of news teams, but when it operates as a satire it is amusing. When it turns news teams into street gangs and has them fight each other in alleyways using medieval torture devices as instruments, it's not. You don't need to show people having their arms torn off to have a funny movie, even if it's only to pay homage with the line, "It's getting to be ri-goddam-DICulous!"
The movie makes some interesting points about women entering into the news workforce and the torturous times that the all-male newsteams suffered as a result. That's what the movie satirizes, as you know, and when it sticks to that it's pretty funny. There are probably five or six times during the movie that I laughed out loud and had to rewind a couple of times because it was so funny, but more than half of the movie was so dumb that I was sitting stone-faced for 15-20 minutes at a time. When it comes to comedy movies, I prefer to leave the stone-face-making to Buster Keaton.
Vince Vaughn plays a very small part in the film, which is sad because if he had a bigger part (and a different one, as it were) the movie could have been a lot better. It is not uncommon for him to carry an entire film, like he did in Old School, Clay Pigeons, Psycho, Made, Swingers, Dodgeball, The Cell, Return to Paradise, etc. He nearly steals this movie and he wasn't even credited, for crying out loud.
He is at one point so overcome with rage at being second place in ratings to a team that includes a man who taunts him with such gems as "Where'd you get YOUR suit, the toilet store?" that he slams his fist against the hood of his van like a rebellious 12-year-old. It's disappointing that his role doesn't really go uphill from there, but his exit from the film is truly telling. His exit from the movie plays out like this: he's talking into the TV camera on location for a news story (the birth of a panda which, in this movie's plane of existence, has captivated the world). When he finishes his line, he throws his microphone to the ground and stalks off with a disgusted look on his face. I don't know why, but I got the feeling that he became Vince Vaughn again. His expression was a moment of clarity realized on the set of this movie, not as his character. I don't know why, but I got the feeling that Vince Vaughn decided he had had enough of this movie and was getting the hell out of there.
I tended to agree.