"Ted" is a peculiar beast. This is the type of film that manages to encompass all of the humor that our generation of young men finds endearing--that is it is crude, mildly witty, affable and completely forgettable. "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane is the funny man for our boys who are glued to the television, smoking pot and eating Doritos. His film is pointless, drawn out and at times ludicrously stupid, yet it is endearing in its own right for as long as you can bear to watch it.
Mark Wahlberg stars as John Bennett, a loner as a child who made a wish on a shooting star that his stuffed teddy bear would come to life and keep him company. As narrator Patrick Stewart explains, "nothing is more powerful than a young boy's wish". Teddy (Ted, for short) miraculously comes to life and he and young John vow to be best friends forever.
Now 35 years old and in a serious relationship with a lovely girl named Lori (Mila Kunis), John and Ted are still best friends and John's life is going nowhere. We know from a million other films just like this that Lori will pose an ultimatum to John: it's Ted or her. John will try to be a better man and grow up, but he will be met with pitfalls along the way, lose his girl and his friend, and finally reclaim them both after proving himself in a great challenge for a great big happy ending. Ta da! You've just aced rom-com 101.
Of course all of this slightly deviates from the basic structure due to the fact that one member of this triangle is a stuffed bear who likes to get high and watch SpongeBob, or have sex at the grocery store he works at with coworkers on top of the produce. The bear jokes are funny for a while, but they grow stale about thirty minutes in. I realized that and then learned the horrible truth that the movie is just shy of two hours long.
MacFarlane (who co-wrote, directed and voices Ted) is a clever, clever man. There is no doubt about that. His encyclopedic knowledge of 80's and 90's pop culture has always done him great credit in the television world, and has made him a household name (or at least the 19-year-old's basement hovel name) in late night t.v. His shows are 23 minutes long, lack any sort of credible narrative structure, and are basically a series of one-liners strung together by filler dialogue. There is nothing wrong with that; it's easy, it's watchable, and if you get the references it can even be amusing.
It is not acceptable, however, to make a film with this same structure, especially if the film is two hours long. It honestly felt like I was watching six episodes of "Family Guy" back to back with a loose message about the difficulties of adulthood thrown in for good measure. Some of the characters even seemed to be taken directly out of his shows. I guess I should have expected that. After all, that is probably what the audience was hoping for in going to see a film with MacFarlane's name attached to it. But it became tedious, and because we know the entirety of the film in the first twenty minutes there was nothing to do but listen to a multitude of punchlines with little setup.
Wahlberg and Kunis are both funny and charming, though he is way too old to be playing the boyfriend of someone so disgustingly pretty (as he ages I've noticed him looking more Kevin Bacon-esque. Am I wrong?). And though it sounds stupid, the chemistry between the two live actors and Ted was believable. The movie also features some funny cameos from Norah Jones, Ryan Reynolds and Sam J. Jones, actor in the Flash Gordon show and John and Ted's idol.
This is an okay movie and a perfectly good watch if you're stoned at midnight with a few buddies. Other than that, don't waste your time. It's so long, especially with a throwaway subplot about a psychotic kidnapper which devolves into a boring and poorly shot car chase. My advice to you would be to save your money and just watch some of his cartoons on Netflix. My advice to MacFarlane would be to take some classes on script writing. If there is no growth in what he does then what's the point? I don't mean he needs to crank out "Citizen Kane" or something, but regurgitating the same stuff he has been doing for over a decade and expecting people to pay through the nose to see it doesn't sit well with me.
1.5/4
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