Woody Allen once joked that his wife had divorced him on the grounds of "insufficient laughter", and on that same basis I find myself duly estranged from Ron Burgundy. If you're an Anchorman fan you'll know that this sequel's evolution has been tortuous, with Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay very publicly butting heads with Paramount after the studio claimed: "We've run the numbers and it's not a good fit." (Ferrell, Paul Rudd and Steve Carell have all become a lot more expensive since Anchorman grossed $90m worldwide on a $26m budget in 2004.)

Finally, after several false starts and talk of a Broadway musical, Anchorman 2 arrives as a broad swipe at rolling news, with Burgundy enlisted to front the 24-hour news network GNN, owned by an Australian multimillionaire who puts Rupert Murdoch's soul in Richard Branson's body. Rounding up the old team (Carell's Brick Tamland attending his own funeral is an early highlight), Ron discovers that live car chases, animal stories and wanton patriotism ("Don't just have a great night, have an American night") will whack interviews with Arafat in the ratings war.

While the underlying thread is sound (and more satirically substantial than its predecessor), the brickbat humour rings hollow, with the usual knob gags offset by a string of ill-judged "interracial intercourse" japes as drawn out as they are old hat. A superfluity of celebrity cameos in the second half signals a loss of creative confidence, with the street fight of the original expanded into a spot-the-star spectacular in which even Sacha Baron Cohen manages to be dull. New pack member Kristen Wiig raises a few chuckles as Brick's love interest (he's still the funniest thing in the franchise) but it's never enough to produce a properly hearty guffaw. As for the shark that bookends the action, Burgundy may wrestle it, but the movie comes perilously close to jumping it.