Movies

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, July 8, 2004

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

Let's hope Will Ferrell hasn't gotten rid of his green suit from his hit movie Elf.

Chances are good he won't be asked again to wear his burgundy polyester blazer from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, an unfunny comedy about a chauvinistic San Diego TV newscaster trying to resist attempts to pair him with a female anchor.

Set in The Mary Tyler Moore Show 1970s era of TV newscasts, the film's running gag about painful attempts by the all-male "News Team" at Channel 4 to keep women off San Diego's number-one news show seems stale from the start.

Perhaps this would have been funny and pointed 30 years ago, when women were trying to smash through the glass ceiling of TV journalism. Come to think of it, Jane Fonda played a TV reporter trying to break out into "serious" news in 1979's The China Syndrome, though that film was played for thrills.

Today it plays as a bunch of sexist jokes. Everything is fair game in a desperate attempt for laughs, including erections and menstruation.

One can sense something amiss long before Anchorman's funniest gag arrives and -- oh no! -- it turns out to be the sight of a fluffy little dog being kicked like a football off a bridge by a hulking biker.

Ferrell has no one to blame but himself for the groaner gags and stupid antics that he and his three "News Team" partners parade before us in Anchorman.

Ferrell co-wrote the script with director Adam McKay, a former Saturday Night Live head writer and co-founder of the Upright Citizen's Brigade comedy troupe, which has played for the past three years at the Newport International Film Festival.

Anchorman's Ron Burgundy is from the pompous dunderheaded school of TV news reporting espoused by Ted Knight's Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, although Ron is even more of an insufferable jerk.

He tells a woman at a party that he's "very important" while trying to pick her up with sexist lines that should get his face smacked.

Then he wonders why he goes home alone to have heart-to-heart conversations with his pooch, Baxter (in honor of Ted Baxter, perhaps?) whom he sees as a "mini Buddha covered in hair."

Ron meets his match in Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), a new reporter at Channel 4 who has eyes on the anchor chair and doesn't want to cover lightweight stuff such as kitty fashion shows.

Inexplicably, she also falls big time for Ron. Even when Ron blurts out reports of their bedroom antics on the air, it fails to dampen her enthusiasm for him, which makes the plot of Anchorman ridiculous.

Veronica is smart, sassy, vivacious, yet extraordinarily dumb when it comes to romantic choices.

When push comes to shove, Ron and Veronica actually duke it out in a knockdown fight that ends on the floor of the Channel 4 newsroom. It's just embarrassing. Silly to the point of inanity is a later West Side Story-style rumble in an alley between San Diego's competing news teams, led by the likes of Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Luke Wilson and Tim Robbins, most of them unbilled. In a film filled with idiotic moments, this may top them all.

*

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Starring: Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, David Koechner, Fred Willard.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, sexual situations, profanity, adult themes.

Runing time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.