Release Date: July 9, 2004

(out of 4)

Expectations have a lot to do with whether or not you are going to enjoy a movie, and I have to admit, in my subjective view, I had high expectations for “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.” I thought it was going to give the ’70’s a real lashing, thinking it would really play up on sexual harassment in the workplace and male chauvinism in general, and also have some smart humor about its targets. But this movie is as deep as “The Wedding Singer” with Adam Sandler, or any Adam Sandler comedy particularly of the pre-Paul Thomas Anderson era.

Will Ferrell should be considered a major movie star even if this movie dovetails at the box office after a couple of weekends. It probably will do all right; in fact, I bet it will do bang-up business. But it will not as exceed or come close to the success of Ferrell’s last movie “Elf,” which is a much better movie that you could watch two or three times and not get tired of. “Anchorman” gets pretty tired at about the halfway mark. Admittedly, I was howling with laughter until that point where after that the laughs came to a complete halt. I have never seen a movie that runs out of gas as badly as “Anchorman” does and I felt a gnawing disappointment set in after it was over. It’s like the same kind of feeling you get after eating cotton candy; you ask, “Is that all there is?”

Ferrell has the priceless look of overstuffed egotism as leading anchorman Ron Burgundy, who off-camera believes he is God’s gift to women and to polyester threads. “Anchorman” makes the ’70’s look tacky but not as dorky as the fashion mishaps that were seen in “Starsky & Hutch,” or even “Boogie Nights” which has more laughs than this movie. The rest of the Channel Four news team are hideous 70’s caricatures – Paul Rudd as ace news reporter Brian Fantana, David Koechner as sports anchor Champ Kind, and Steve Carell (who played the smug anchor who steals Jim Carrey’s job in “Bruce Almighty”) as incompetent and verbally challenged weather man Brick Tamland.

It’s a boys’ world until the network decides to throw some female flavor into their news broadcast. Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) is hired to do soft news (there is no hard news in “Anchorman,” really not at all. In fact, the choice to make the news low budget makes the movie look low budget, or maybe more telling - low budget in the imagination department). Veronica threatens the very manly existence of the news team machoism, and the gang decides that either she has to be a sex kitten to be accepted, or she has to leave for good.

Veronica’s challenge is to earn respect without tarnishing her virtues. Veronica has aspirations to go to the top – to make co-news anchor. Burgundy convinces Veronica to see him out of the office, insinuating that it may boost her status around the office. The other men make crude passes on Veronica, and it’s at this point that “Anchorman” looks like its seriously going to make an attack on sexual harassment, and do something pointedly funny about undervalued feminism. Instead, the movie makes the point to not do anything more than to throw one-line punchlines around.

A large number of guest star cameos come through the gates when the movie goes into automatic pilot. I won’t reveal which actors show up, but I will mention one (Spoiler alert.) There is a cameo by Jack Black, and he isn’t given one decent joke in his entire appearance. The behind-the-camera team of this movie must have figured that if they hired some funny people for a day, they could come in and improvise something funny. It doesn’t happen. Bad hairstyles and ugly neckties alone can’t make an actor more interesting.

There is also a gang war that breaks out between competing Southern California news teams. The whole sequence is kind of outlandish and over-the-top (it has echoes of “Braveheart” and “Gladiator”), but it can’t be worth more than a chuckle or a sigh maybe. “Anchorman” makes the unfortunate decision of following one fight sequence with yet another fight sequence right afterwards, that is miserably unfunny. That is repetition practiced at its worst.

The rest of the movie plummets from there. The failure to produce a satisfying second-half to the movie simply has to do with the lackluster script. Ferrell co-wrote the film with Adam McKay (who also directed), and together they seemed to have come up with funny concepts but couldn’t execute anything exciting or original out of their ideas. “Anchorman” should have tons of laughs considering its potential targets: network news, swinging sex, stifled feminism, bad disco. Instead, the movie throws its characters into a bear pit at the San Diego zoo. Nothing newsworthy happening there.