Review: Ted 2

Ted (voiced by Peter Griffin) has married his love Tammy Lynn (Jessica Barth), and when we pick things up, the fit has hit the shan and the situation looks like a domestic scene from a Martin Scorsese movie (I’m pretty sure the shaky cam style was meant to evoke “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” or “Raging Bull”). Ted wants them to have a baby to save their marriage, despite not having the right anatomy for such a thing to be possible. So they try adoption, only for their application to raise red flags for the U.S. government, who for some reason only now decide that Ted is not, in fact, a person. Therefore he can’t adopt children, he can’t keep his job, and even his marriage to Tammy-Lynn is stripped of its legitimacy and annulled. That’s when Ted and his ‘Thunder Buddy’ John (Mark Wahlberg) decide to act on this and fight for Ted’s right to be considered a person (Never mind that not only is he a toy, but he’s also a bear…you’re not meant to think about that. Or think at all). They hire young, pretty stoner lawyer Samantha (Amanda Seyfried), who really wishes they could get the help of top civil rights lawyer Patrick Meighan (Morgan Freeman!). Meanwhile, weirdo loser Donny, a janitor for Hasbro, plots a scheme to get possession of Ted, now that he’s not currently considered to be a ‘person’, and tries to get the help of Hasbro bigwig Mr. Jessup (John Carroll Lynch).

 

I’m not a “Family Guy” fan and didn’t think the first “Ted” was terribly good, either. I knew right from the opening credits sequence that this 2015 sequel from director/co-writer Seth MacFarlane (“Ted”, “A Million Ways to Die in the West”) was going to be even worse. All I really liked about the first film was the random and hilarious “Flash Gordon” references. This one opens with Sam J. Jones once again playing a bizarro version of himself, but this time I wasn’t laughing. Couple that with the fact that Ted is essentially a furry Peter Griffin and MacFarlane gets his Busby-Berkeley on in the tedious credits sequence, and yeah…this just isn’t for me. For every amusing bit like the Liam Neeson cameo, there’s MacFarlane making a lame gay joke about Jay Leno…and Leno turns up to take part in it and sully himself in my eyes even further than that whole debacle with Conan. Meanwhile, please America, will you stop putting your national sports heroes in films? 9 times out of 10, no one outside of America knows who these people are, nor do we care. 25 minutes and one Tom Brady cameo into the film and I was finding this seriously desperate, embarrassing, and mostly unfunny. When Amanda Seyfried turned up as a ‘cool’ lawyer (i.e. She smokes dope from a bong), I realised I was in for a bit of a slog.

 

Every now and then there’d be an amusing moment; A discussion about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first name, Seyfried being compared to Gollum, “SNL” alum Kate McKinnon doing a dead-on impersonation of Seyfried, a cute gag on the casting of Superman with an unlikely choice, or Giovanni Ribisi once again turning up and being creepy as hell. The scene where Patrick Warburton and Michael Dorn dress as cut-rate cosplay versions of their most famous TV sci-fi/superhero characters at ComicCon, is a cute gag too. I also liked the scene where Ted and Wahlberg heckle an improv comedy troupe by suggesting completely inappropriate (and virtually impossible) topics. However, the biggest laugh comes in a scene involving Ted, Ribisi, and a certain Neil Diamond song that everyone knows the words to.

 

For the most part, though, it was a miss for me. There’s way too many stretches of zero laughs, and to be honest, there’s way too much Ted and way too little Wahlberg, who becomes a passive observer essentially in this film. At the very least there’s too much Ted and too few laughs. It’s probably entirely the point, but I thought even for a film about a magically talking bear, that the film’s plot was infantile and stupid. On a TV show, especially an animated one, stupidity and lame plotting aren’t so difficult to deal with, but since this wasn’t particularly funny, I found myself rolling my eyes a lot in regards to the story.

 

As with the first film, this is probably the exact film Seth MacFarlane wanted to make. He and his fans will be pleased with it. My tolerance for MacFarlane is limited to some of the movie parodies on “Family Guy” and his ‘We Saw Your Boobs’ song at the Oscars (It was crude and shameless, but so random I couldn’t help laughing). This, I don’t really get, and it’s even less funny than the first film. I like crude humour, but only if there’s some smarts to go along with it. “South Park” and Billy Connolly spring to mind. Seth, for me, has never gotten that balance right and certainly doesn’t get it right here. MacFarlane co-wrote with Alex Sulkin and Wellesley Wild (his cronies from “Family Guy” and “Ted”), the latter of whom sounds like he should be the lead character in a sitcom about an acerbic British butler. 

 

Rating: C