The Essentials: The Films Of Adam McKay

Long before he directed “Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy,” a movie that shaped the sensibility of 2000’s screen comedy to an immeasurable degree, Adam McKay was already schooled in the art of making people laugh. As a young man, the Denver-born McKay cut his teeth at venerated Chicago comedy institutions, like Second City, IO, and Upright Citizens Brigade. McKay then went on to audition for “Saturday Night Live,” where he failed to make the cut as a cast member. Instead, he became the show’s head writer. He wasn’t even 30 years old.

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It was at “Saturday Night Live” that McKay met Will Ferrell, the star and frequent co-writer of five out of the eight feature films McKay has directed to date. Once McKay and Ferrell began writing together, the duo discovered that they had a mutual interest in a certain kind of blustery, overcompensating, proudly ignorant American male archetype. That archetype was later given a slew of names – Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby, George W. Bush, etc. – but there is nevertheless a hairy, defiantly unhinged macho id that defines the work that McKay and Ferrell do together, one that ensures that the pair’s collaborations will always remain a cut above the frat-comedy competition, in terms of both quality and laughs.  

Without question, McKay has done funny, incisive work across the media spectrum over the years. He’s one of the founders of the early D.I.Y. humor website Funny Or Die, he was behind a Broadway show wherein Ferrell reprised his doltish Dubya impression from ‘SNL‘ (“You’re Welcome, America”), and he’s lent his name as a producer to a number of interesting film and television projects over the years, including our beloved “Succession” (McKay also directed the pilot), indie curios like “Casa De Mi Padre” and “Sleeping With Other People,” daring works of anti-comedy like “Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie,” the early dirtball output of Danny McBride and Jody Hill (“Eastbound & Down,” “The Foot Fist Way,” both of which play like a crueler “Talladega Nights” at times), this year’s terrific, wildly out-there “Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar,” and even an underappreciated media satire directed by his wife, Shira Piven (the Kristen Wiig-starring “Welcome To Me”).  The last few years have seen a noticeable shift in McKay’s creative temperament, as he’s largely pivoted away from the loopy chicanery of the “Anchorman” movies and towards a more incensed, outwardly political mindset that has produced the divisive likes of “Vice” and “The Big Short.” 

McKay is coming in hot this awards season with “Don’t Look Up,” a star-studded Netflix original that will hopefully strike a seriocomic tone that unites the dueling sides of his fanbase. A stressed-seeming Leonardo Dicaprio stars alongside Jennifer Lawrence, both playing two underpaid, overworked astronomers who take it upon themselves to warn all of humanity of an approaching comet that will obliterate life on earth. Those two above-mentioned screen favorites lead a who’s-who cast that also includes Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Timothee Chalamet, Scott Mescudi, Tyler Perry, Ariana Grande, and many, many more, and the first released clip from this year’s TUDUM almost makes it seem as if McKay is inching into Armando Iannucci territory with what should be his biggest movie to date. Either way, “Don’t Look Up” is destined to pack a topical punch, and it’s inarguably one of the most buzzed-about movies of 2021’s fall movie season.

Please enjoy our list of the essential Adam McKay films. Shake n’ bake, baby!

“Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy” (2004)
Will Ferrell was a largely untested presence on the big screen in the early 2000s, mostly having been relegated to a handful of forgettable, SNL-adjacent comedies from that period (“Superstar,” “A Night At The Roxbury”). “Anchorman,” McKay’s filmmaking debut, is the comedy smash that launched a million catchphrases, and ultimately introduced the goofball Will Ferrell brand to movie audiences worldwide. “Anchorman” is an ingenious doofus farce that’s every bit as abrasively silly as a Marx Brothers classic, and yet it makes time to unpacks corporate workplace chauvinism, “fake news” (which gets a workout in the sequel), and the proper way to pronounce “San Diego.” Ferrell is a comic tour-de-force as the mustachioed, gloriously oblivious himbo Burgundy, though Steve Carrell, as dim-witted weatherman Brick Tamland, often steals the show, as do Christina Applegate as Ron’s spry romantic sparring partner and Paul Rudd as the silky-smooth, chowder-brained ladies’ man, Brian Fantana. Keep your eyes peeled during the big newscaster team brawl for cameos from basically every comedy star of the 2000s, a group that obviously includes Frat Pack members Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, and hey, is that Tim Robbins in the mix?

“Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby” (2006)
In hindsight, we should have seen it coming that McKay would go on to make political movies: 2006’s “Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby” isn’t just a characteristically boisterous and raunchy Will Ferrell laffer, it also happens to be a deceptively unsparing takedown of “me-first” American exceptionalism and the peculiar peccadillos of Red State culture. Ricky Bobby isn’t much more than a version of Ron Burgundy who drinks Bud Light instead of scotch – in other words, the same deluded, vainglorious boob that Ferrell had already perfected – but the movie’s real ace in the hole is its star’s lunatic chemistry with John C. Reilly, playing peacocking second banana Cal Naughton Jr., whose star as a driver comes to eclipse Ricky’s own; it’s no exaggeration to say that Reilly’s rationalization for why his character only prays to Baby Jesus is one of the funniest things we’ve ever seen. Not to deploy a car pun here, but “Talladega Nights” really fires on all cylinders.

“Step Brothers” (2008)
McKay’s Dadaist comedic masterwork “Step Brothers” can be interpreted in many ways: as a cautionary tale against parents letting their grown children move back in with them, a fairy tale about perma-arrested adolescence, or, even a kind of twisted slapstick tragedy. What’s indisputable is that “Step Brothers” is unreasonably, ridiculously, next-level funny – maybe McKay’s funniest movie on the whole, though it would be more diplomatic to say that every fan has their favorite. Ferrell and Reilly take their delirious repartee from “Talladega Nights” to a more depraved level in this brain-breakingly weird surrealist masterwork, playing Dale Doback and Brennan Huff: two fully grown, entirely sociopathic adult men whose failure to successfully integrate into polite society has found them moving back in with their miserable parents, deliciously underplayed by Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen. The bits here are disgusting, deplorable, and totally top-shelf: we’re partial to the extended sleepwalking sequence, and Adam Scott’s rendition of “Sweet Child Of Mine,” which somehow manages to be more terrifying than “Carpool Karaoke” – and like “Anchorman,” this is a movie that’s all but destined to be quoted at work parties, in dorm rooms, and marathon smoke sessions from now until the end of time.

“The Other Guys” (2010)
“The Other Guys,” McKay’s attempt at skewering the conventions of buddy-cop movies, admittedly contains some of the writer/director’s most inspired bits to date. Let’s see: there’s the tragic and hilarious death of Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson’s shit-kicking alpha dogs, the reveal that Ferrell’s milquetoast desk cop was once a pimp named Gator, the quietest fight scene in movie history, and Michael Keaton’s character’s running obsession with the R&B group TLC, to name a few. “The Other Guys” is not a movie that wants for laughs, but it does often feel more like a strung-together series of zany vignettes than an actual movie. Ferrell, his character disguising a dark private life behind an unassuming white-collar façade, is a fine foil for chest-puffing co-star Mark Wahlberg, but “The Other Guys” falters when it gives into the neoliberal hectoring that occasionally tarnishes McKay’s later movies. Granted, it’s not every silly studio comedy that concludes with a slideshow outlining the particulars of Ponzi schemes set to Rage Against The Machine’s cover of “Maggie’s Farm” by Bob Dylan, but “The Other Guys’” shrewd social insights can’t disguise that McKay doesn’t always have the firmest grasp of his movie’s tone.

“Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues”
It was inevitable that someone would force McKay and Ferrell to try and re-capture the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of the idiot blockbuster that catapulted them both to superstardom. While really, only time will tell, the official “Anchorman” sequel – “The Legend Continues” – might just be the last outright dumbass-opus that McKay has in him, unless we really do get a second “Step Brothers” chapter in 2023 or something. In any case, it’s a shame that “Anchorman 2” is by far McKay’s weakest comedy: there are chuckles to be had here, yes. Ferrell, Rudd, and the boys seem to be having a gas reprising their vapid male buffoons from the first movie, and some of the screenplay’s wackier bits do admittedly land – a riotous high point being when Ron and the fellas decide to try this hip new street drug called “crack” for the first time, whilst on-air – “The Legend Continues” often feels a bit too worked-over to summon the original movie’s one-of-a-kind vibe.

“The Big Short” (2015)
“The Big Short” is one of the more significant movies in McKay’s oeuvre in that it marks his first attempt to consciously move away from the lowbrow humor that marked his early comedies and towards more sophisticated, topical material that addresses the issues of our day. Alas, the film, while conceptually admirable, is far from the director’s best work. Enlivened by first-rate acting, “The Big Short” presents the financial crisis of 2007 like a caffeinated PowerPoint presentation, trotting out smug cameos from the likes of Selena Gomez and Anthony Bourdain (RIP) to explain how things like collateralized debt obligations work. It’s largely as dreary to watch as it sounds, but McKay gets brilliant work out of his cast, particularly Christian Bale as eccentric investor Michael Burry, Ryan Gosling as a clueless type-A finance bro who wouldn’t be totally out of place in Ron Burgundy’s newsroom, and sly supporting performances from the likes of John Magaro, Marisa Tomei, Melissa Leo, and “Succession” standout, Jeremy Strong.

“Vice” (2018)
While it’s hard to buy into the pious notion that the American public elected Dick Cheney because we’re all too collectively stupid and have seen too many “Fast and Furious” movies, there’s a palpable bitterness rising to the surface of McKay’s jokey, yet barbed “Vice,” a slow-motion satirical trainwreck of an anti-biopic about the infamous former V.P. and Halliburton CEO, that makes the film fascinating even when its execution is unwieldy or unsubtle. What’s more is that Christian Bale, returning to work with McKay after “The Big Short,” gives one of his most impressively transformative performances to date, effectively becoming Cheney. Some folks failed to respond to “Vice” because they missed the frivolity and cheery humor of McKay’s earlier work, and felt, not without reason, that they were being condescended to – though, in all fairness, when you look at the war crimes and atrocities committed by the Bush administration, doesn’t anger seem like a reasonable response?

“Don’t Look Up” (2021)
There are certainly smug, glib, and condescending elements to “Vice” and “The Big Short,” but the self-satisfied and self-congratulatory mien Adam McKay has let loose in recent years is fully on display in his disaster comedy “Don’t Look Up.” Yes, it features a stellar cast, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Timothée Chalamet, Jonah Hill, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and more, but so many of them are hammy and so over-the-top. Yes, it’s an over-the-top movie, like a live-action adaptation of a “Simpsons” episode about an important topic (maybe inadvertently adapted from “Bart’s Comet” from season six), but it’s still a little too smarmy and unctuous. DiCaprio and Lawrence star as two low-level astronomers who try and convince the world about an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth. First, they meet the skepticism of the Trump-ian like White House (Streep and Hill, the latter admittedly hilarious), and then they hit the talk show circuit, trying to raise their concerns higher (Blanchett and Tyler Perry play morning talk show hosts), but of course, our species, mankind, is too stupid, polarized, broken, selfish and with our head’s too far up our own asses to do anything about it. The problem with the movie is just that: it starts with a point of today’s reality—the cultural scenario we’re describing is already our reality —and adds nothing to it other than the obvious. Yes, people try and undercut and undermine the astronomers and various scientists warnings, conspiracy theories pop up, the right tries to villanize their warnings and it all just becomes a clumsy and obvious metaphor for the way we’re doing nothing about climate change and slowly watching the environment turn into climate disaster. You could be presented this premise without knowing the movie and likely write the same damn movie. While it has a few good moments, Hill is on fire throughout and the Ariana Grande song is genuinely funny, its pompous, self-righteous, am I right, am I right? shit-eating grin is impossibly annoying by the end. – Rodrigo Perez