Will Ferrell is a funny guy. That may seem simplistic, but the success of his movies depends less on clever writing and direction than on his own charming, spastic personality and ability to deliver sometimes uninspired lines with a gusto that can make almost any utterance funny.
Such is the case with Anchorman, a very funny film that wouldn't work nearly as well without Ferrell as its central figure, newsman Ron Burgundy. Set in the '70s, Anchorman focuses on Burgundy, San Diego's top newsreader, and his crack team, including sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner), dim weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) and reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd). Into their boys' club of a newsroom comes serious journalist Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), a smart, career-minded woman looking to break through the glass ceiling and become the world's first anchorwoman.
That's all co-writers Ferrell and Adam McKay (a former Saturday Night Live writer who also directs) give the audience in terms of plot, but it's more than enough. Like most movies from SNL players, Anchorman plays like an extended sketch, or sometimes several sketches strung together, and watching it for 90 minutes can feel a bit much. But if the film is one-note, it's one great note, and Ferrell and his supporting cast have found a good source from which to mine some quality laughs. Like the recent Starsky & Hutch, Anchorman takes easy potshots at its era, but it has a core of truth to it, too, in its skewering of the misogynistic news business.
As the film's focus, Ferrell certainly commands attention, and his boorish, insensitive Ron is nevertheless strangely likable. Many of the jokes are obvious, and some of the lines don't even really qualify as jokes, but Ferrell manages to make nearly all of it funny simply by the way he speaks and the look on his face when he opens his mouth. Among the supporting players, Carell (The Daily Show) does best as the moronic Brick, spouting a stream of non sequiturs. Applegate is saddled with a truly thankless role, mostly playing the straight man (or straight woman, in this case), but she has a surprisingly light comic touch and manages to pull off her toughest task, making you believe she finds Will Ferrell attractive.
Certain bits—especially a cameo-laden, over-the-top fight scene between various news teams and an animated sequence that represents Ron and Veronica's bedroom activities—feel like padding and don't do anything to advance the admittedly thin story. But the barrage of very funny jokes makes up for any missteps, and by the end of the film you'll likely only remember the good parts. Ferrell has hit a good balance here between the raunch of Old School and the sweetness of Elf, and as long as he doesn't go all Mike Meyers, with self-indulgent sequels and ego substituting for humor, he's got a long career of being a funny guy ahead of him.