It just tries too hard

Rating: 4/10 (1 January 2005)

"Anchorman" tries hard to be funny. It desperately wants to be funny. But in the end, it just doesn't come through.
I've seen the same problem in all too many movies made by 'Saturday Night Live' alumni--an idea that might (or might not) have made for good sketch comedy is mercilessly stretched over 90 minutes or so, and usually doesn't survive the experience.
An obnoxious TV news anchor in the swingin' 70s? The idea itself isn't too bad--maybe Ron Burgundy could have done well as a recurring character on SNL, but you can't build a feature film around a character like that. The sex jokes and 70s-culture references get old in a hell of a hurry, and there's just nowhere left for the movie to go. As happens so often on SNL (and other sketch-comedy shows, like MAD TV), "Anchorman" feels as though they started out with a great idea, then said "Damn...now that everyone's watching, how do we finish this?"
I will admit, there are a couple of genuine "bwa-ha funny" moments (the scenes with the Teleprompter are definitely on that list), and those moments do save the movie from being a total disaster. They don't build on any of these funny moments, though--they happen, then they die off, and the script is very uneven as a result.
Overall: very, very thin stuff. There just isn't enough material here to be funny for more than five to ten minutes, let alone an hour and a half.