For the week of April 1st, the biggest release is Paramount's Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. In some ways, this anarchic comedy had to fulfill the tallest of orders: how does one make a successful sequel to a film - Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - that made a name for itself as a cult classic? Part of why the first Anchorman has maintained such a hold in the American comedy landscape is that you'd have to go back to the Marx Brothers to find such deliriously inspired absurdism, and Anchorman 2 is a little too content to update iconic beats from its predecessor. Baxter the dog, once again, squares off against a bizarrely formidable animal foe; Ron (Will Ferrell, naturally) indulges in an illicit romance with an office peer (Meagan Good, filling in for a mostly absent Christina Applegate, whose work here amounts to an extended cameo); and the News Team's feud with Jason Marsden's rival anchor escalates into a star-studded brawl that's equal parts West Side Story, The Warriors, and Gangs of New York. The irony is, the film is most successful when it deviates from the unexpected. Ron's inexplicable blindness/rehabilitation of a baby shark (don't ask) is the film's comic highpoint, followed closely by his professional addiction to crack (really don't ask) and his pathetic fall from grace in the first act that involves two arrogant dolphins and a beyond-haphazard suicide attempt.
What saves the film is a simple thing, really; as derivative as it can be, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is consistently, relentlessly funny. For every bum gag (Ron meeting Good's family; Josh Lawson's unfunny Rupert Murdoch parody), there are two or three that hit hard, and that's a testament to director Adam McKay's keen sense of timing and to his committed cast. That last point bears repeating. That Ferrell and his news team (Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and Steve Carell) are funny is no surprise: that people like Dylan Baker, Kristen Wiig, Marsden, and Greg Kinnear get as many laughs as the leads proves how excited actors are about contributing to the Anchorman universe. In some ways, this Blu-ray offers the ideal Anchorman experience. You get the polished theatrical cut, a slightly longer extended version, and a two-and-a-half-hour alternate version that McKay and his editor Brent White filled with 763 entirely new jokes. Not only is this version essential viewing for comedy fans (you can make so many observations about comic pace and improvisation when comparing the differences between this and the theatrical version), but it is even stranger and more outré than the first cut, making it, in some ways, a purer exemplar of Anchorman 1's unpredictable comedy objectives.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "transitions from lovably zany to downright weird in its second half, relying on far-flung oddity rather than realistically grounded humor. Fortunately, the opening half, and even much of that second half, works in a tremendous amount of gut-busting humor, humor that's crude, tactless, tasteless, racist, and uproariously random. There's rarely a dull moment, thanks in large part to Will Ferrell's complete screen domination and, to a lesser but certainly not frivolous extent, Steve Carell's mastery of his character's childlike naiveté deadpan delivery. Ferrell's comedic genius is on full display here, outshining his cast mates by leaps and bounds, not because they're in any way terrible but because he's so fantastic in the part, fully inhabiting a man of obvious intelligence, charisma, and stature but unable to differentiate between his inner and outer voice and finding both pleasure and pain in the consequences of his actions. Even as the story progresses to the truly absurd, Ferrell manages to draw an endless supply of humor from the part, milking every scene and unearthing every detail to his, and the film's, advantage. He's surrounded by his trio of returning pals from the original film and also several excellent newcomers, including Meagan Good, Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear, and James Marsden as the slick young hot shot anchor who serves as the de facto antagonist."
Far less successful is Universal's recent boondoggle 47 Ronin. Director Carl Rinsch's feature-length debut (he made his mark as a director of commercials and shorts) is the movie equivalent of "Murphy's Law"; the neophyte helmer had to combat almost every production malady known to man, from special effects and 3D challenges that slowed down filming almost as much as the bilingual shooting schedule did (to maximize international appeal, Universal mandated separate English and Japanese versions of the film), to a script that was in flux as scenes rolled, to an endless reshoot and post-production session – over a year long, depending what you read – that swelled the budget and encountered such challenges that the studio reportedly removed Rinsch from the creative process for his inability to satisfy the film's many masters. Sometimes, this level of behind-the-scenes strife can yield a positive result (see: Tootsie, Apocalypse Now, World War Z), but 47 Ronin is the rule, not the exception. The legend of the 47 ronin contains all the necessaries for great screen entertainment (for a much better iteration of this tale, see Kenji Mizoguchi's 1941 version), which makes this misfire all the more bewildering. It's simultaneously bloated and undercooked, tossing out lavish fight scenes and setpieces that all feel vaguely truncated; I've never seen so many big boss-fights either sputter out or end abruptly, although maybe Rinsch and Universal's editors wanted to cut away from the wildly unconvincing CGI graphics before anyone would start criticizing the seams. Yet even worse than the middling action and the terrible graphics are the performances. The film is too short to really delve into the titular characters, putting the burden on Keanu Reeves' half-breed Kai and Hiroyuki Sanada's stoic Oishi, both of whom can't use their formidable charisma to save 47 Ronin (the less said about Rinko Kikuchi's camp witch, the better). The movie around them is just too unwieldy: at least Reeves has his excellent Man of Tai Chi to take the focus away from this turkey.
Kenneth Brown wrote that "Drawing more heavily from action-fantasy anime than literary or cinematic Chűshingura, 47 Ronin finds its inspiration in Ninja Scroll, Princess Mononoke, and other Japanese animation; some familiar, some more obscure. But it fails them. Each and every one. The only effective use of feudal fantasy comes early on, in a thrilling sequence in which Kai aids the samurai in bringing down a giant beast for Asano. It's a well-crafted scene, yes. Exciting to watch and dazzling to behold. But it also lays crucial groundwork for the character conflict to come. Unfortunately, other mystical encounters are terribly anticlimactic and lend next to nothing to the proceedings, while some particular magical elements - the swords gifted to the ronin chief among them - change absolutely nothing, rendering the quest to retrieve them utterly pointless. Watch for Cinema Sins to rip the whole thing to shreds. Other dramatic action beats glimpsed in the film's trailers turn out to be just that: glimpses on screen. The pistol-slinging, skull-tattooed pirate featured so prominently in Ronin's marketing (the same would-be mini-boss that looms almost as large as Reeves on the movie poster) barely makes an appearance. The behemoth Kai battles in the underground fighting arena has little to offer that wasn't already spoiled in various trailers (including his most fearsome attack and inevitable death). The massive metal samurai that towers over Kai and the ronin is built up to be an unstoppable menace... only to be abandoned when dumb luck saves the warriors the trouble. On and on and on it goes. Opportunity after opportunity squandered, as if 47 Ronin didn't have the budget to pull off its lofty ambitions (If $170 million can't buy amazing, I don't know what can)."
Universal is also streeting a series of value-priced Westerns this week: the John Wayne oaters The War Wagon and Rooster Cogburn, plus the Clint Eastwood vehicles Two Mules for Sister Sara and Joe Kidd. On the whole, these four features don't come close to the lofty peaks of both Wayne and Eastwood's iconic Westerns; the John Sturges-directed Joe Kidd is probably the best of the bunch, with its strong action sequences and tasty supporting performance from the likes of Robert Duvall and Don Stroud, but it's mostly rehashing material done better in the 1966 Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin vehicle The Professionals. Still, given the dearth of quality Westerns these days, I'd rather take four average Westerns over nothing. All of these four offer modest, unpretentious charms, mostly in the respective star pairings offered up. Wayne and Kirk Douglas are an inspired team in The War Wagon (and the exchange they share after they gun down two baddies is one for the time capsule. Douglas: "Mine hit the ground first." Wayne: "Mine was taller."), and Katharine Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine do an amiable job of softening Wayne and Eastwood in, respectively, the lighter-hearted Rooster Cogburn and Two Mules for Sister Sara.
Finally, Twentieth Centruy Fox is bringing the Academy Award-winning musical Once to Blu-ray. On the surface, this microbudget romantic drama looks like nothing more than the poster child for the hipster generation – it's about the creative relationship between a busker and a Czech immigrant (real-life musicians Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who wrote all the songs in the film) who meet on the streets of Dublin and decide to cut a record: director John Carney shoots this on oh-so indie digital video and makes sure that his leads are unnamed for extra twee appeal. By all accounts, Once should be insufferable, yet it's pretty much a delight from start to finish. Part of that success is a result of the winning soundtrack. Hansard and Irglová won an Oscar for their duet "Falling Slowly," and it's certainly a great tune, but all their musical contributions are great, from "All the Way Down" to the ferocious "When Your Mind's Made Up." Furthermore, as a yearning romance ŕ la Brief Encounter, Once proves especially resonant because Hansard and Irglová were falling in love during shooting, and their affection for one another is palpable. Even the stripped-down, lo-fi aesthetic doesn't rankle too much because after a while, it stops feeling like a stylistic affectation. The only way Carney could get this made was to shoot it for around $160,000, which meant dispensing with Hollywood gloss. In its low-key way, this is one of the best musicals of the 21st Century.