Adam McKay Directed Movies Ranked
Adam McKay was, for many a year, something of a forgotten man in Hollywood. His mid-budget feature-length comedy outings were always successful at the box office but the press surrounding them was often directed towards stars like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, a couple of actors McKay brought together on multiple occasions with hilarious effect. He was barely mentioned in promotional material or reviews and thus rarely appreciated for his sizeable efforts; the probable cause being the stigma comedy movies still have with critics. In 2015 however, McKay well and truly jumped out of the shadows and onto the world stage as The Big Short earned him an Oscar win for Adapted Screenplay as well as a nomination for Achievement in Directing. McKay’s bold step from the realm of out-and-out comedy into political satire turned drama pushed his directorial career into an entirely new and altogether more politically charged direction. With a hotly anticipated Dick Cheney centred movie on the way – Backseat (released Dec 2018 and starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Steve Carell) – it seemed like now was the perfect time to take a deeper look at this underappreciated craftsman’s career behind the lens.
Here are Adam McKay’s 6 directed feature-length movies, Ranked…
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6. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues Review
When a sequel takes nearly 10 years to get made, you know it’s probably not going to hit the heights of the original, and that was never more true than with Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.
In 2004 when the original Anchorman was released, the style of comedy and effervescent performances of lead stars like Steve Carell and central protagonist Will Ferrell were hot new things on the market; their off-the-cuff jokes and moments of physical humour compressed into a tight comedy that seemed a laugh a minute. In the sequel, things were much more loose. No longer was the through-line of the plot so clear, nor the jokes so quick. Anchorman 2 was seemingly misguided as the stars were offered way too much time to improvise to their own characters’ needs with the narrative seemingly thrown to one side on multiple occasions, the authority of the director seemingly less prevalent than ever before. Ferrell was off the mark, with this movie acting almost as if a greatest hits of jokes he had hit in countless comedies through the years (including other Adam McKay films), and the much increased star power of Steve Carell and Paul Rudd made it impossible to fit either actor into the movie without their own share of the bloated screen time, thus slowing the movie down to fit their needs and seemingly ruining any momentum that it may have had.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom however, as the news anchor showdown McKay put together is one of the most shocking and utterly hilarious battles in all of film; a true classic in its own right.
Still, not enough to take this film anywhere above last place in this list.
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5. The Other Guys (2010)
It’s not that The Other Guys wasn’t funny, nor is it that this film didn’t have its moments of clever artistry, because quite honestly it had more than enough of both for a comedy of its type. But, when your filmography is as strong as Adam McKay’s, then there’s always got to be one film that seems to be ranked unfairly low, and in the case of this list, it’s The Other Guys.
The Other Guys wasn’t earth shattering nor that well critically received in comparison to other McKay releases, but it more than did its job of earning laughs and presenting absurdist comedy through an almost true-to-life lens in that off-centre way that McKay excelled in throughout the 2000s. Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg were this time the focus of the filmmaker’s attention, with their buddy cop friendship being played so over the top that the parody of the buddy cop genre they ended up making was about as good of a mainstream buddy cop movie as we’ve seen for years.
The standout moment in this one is undoubtedly the small but hilarious and utterly satisfying arc for Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, but some of the jokes popularised in this film remain in the public conscience to this day, with comedies as beloved as 21 Jump Street even taking pointers from the work done on this film.
