Anchorman 2:

The Legend Continues (15, 119 mins)

Director: Adam McKay

4 stars

ALMOST a decade old now, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy endures as one of the most beloved and oft-quoted comedies of recent times.

It grew into a cult success rather than immediately emerge as a smash hit though, but this sequel seems to have arrived with pre-destined blockbuster status thanks to a quite massive marketing push.

As a result expectations are bigger, and so everything about this return is bigger, from the budget to the setpieces to the cast, and for once this ballooning works in a film's favour.

The essence of what worked first time round has been retained too, and the finished product is one of the year's best comedies.

We're now in the 1980s, and find TV news anchorman Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) and his wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) as co-anchors in New York. But their happiness is shattered when Veronica is promoted and Ron is fired, and his ego won't allow him to accept this.

Six months later he's working as an announcer at Seaworld, washed up, drunk and suicidal, introducing dolphins while holding a glass of whisky. But salvation comes when Ron is approached with a revolutionary idea for a 24-hour news channel.

But first he has to track down his old news team: weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) and sports guy Champ Kind (David Koechner), and get them back to New York, where they're to appear on the channel's graveyard shift.

This is a movie dedicated to nothing but silliness and making us laugh, and that's an admirable purity. It provides a near-constant stream of chuckles, though few moments that are totally gut-busting, but Ron's pompous, fruity delivery and nonsensical one-liners are hard to resist.

Brick, too stupid to function, gets many of the daftest, most inspired moments, which work because Carell is 100% committed and believable. He even gets his own subplot this time out, romancing Kristen Wiig's equally brain-diminished colleague.

Though we're now in the 80s, these guys are still buffoons, with their sexism, racism and general idiocy a ripe target for mockery. Other plot strands include the team trying to be tops at the station, coming up against James Marsden's rival anchor, and Ron dating his boss.

Because it's more plotted, it can be a little overstuffed, which sometimes results in a bit of indulgence, and it can get a touch shouty at times. But it's more polished too, and feels like a more complete film than the first.

An extended sequence where Ron goes blind means that the running time ticks towards the two hour mark, which is a bit much, but it takes the surrealism to another level.

And the now obligatory fight with other news channels serves as the insane climax, and offers the best cameos you'll see on screen this year.

Maybe Anchorman 2 is a bit big for its own boots in places, but it succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is to make you laugh by any means necessary. It's a simple ambition, and one which very few comedies manage to fulfil.

See it if you liked: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Other Guys

Walking with Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie (U, 87 mins)

Directors: Neil Nightingale, Barry Cook

2 stars

The BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs, where computer generated dinosaurs roamed real locations for documentary purposes, is here repackaged as a children's adventure, anthropomorphised with added American voices.

An utterly redundant framing device sees a couple of kids out for some fossil hunting in the Alaskan wilderness with their palaeontologist uncle (Karl Urban). The boy thinks it's not cool and decides to stay behind, but his encounter with a talking bird (voiced by John Leguizamo) leads us in to a Cretaceous adventure that's part narrative, part science lesson, blended with Disney's animated feature, Dinosaur.

We follow a pack of Pachyrhinosaurus, and our young hero is Patchi (Justin Long), who's full of adventure and curiosity, which inevitably leads to trouble, though it does seem to take him quite a while to twig that most other creatures around him just want to eat him. The main thrust is his rivalry with his boneheaded older brother, meeting a girl Pachyrhinosaurus, and the dangers facing their pack.

With captions popping up on screen explaining some of their names and vital statistics, it's the sort of thing that kids who already have a passing interest in all things dino will lap up. As an adventure it's rather tame and obvious, with irritating voices (though their mouths don't move) and cheesy pop songs on the soundtrack, and of course poop jokes. But there's plenty of peril, from forest fires to bitey raptors, plus a "Bambi's mum" moment that's admirably bold.

Despite a few dodgy shots, the CGI is largely exemplary, so stuff like a migrating herd is a splendid sight, but some individual movements can be a bit clunky. Once in a while you can see the join or it will look a little cartoony, but mostly it's photo-real. It even goes for that Jurassic Park shot, sweeping across hordes of creatures, but without a fraction of the majesty.

At least it has big screen scope and ambition, and there are worse options out there for engaged kids and their families.

See it if you liked: Dinosaur, Jurassic Park, Chimpanzee