K-SCORE: 16
Writer/Director: Seth MacFarlane
Starring: Seth MacFarlane, Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“watching a teddy bear have meetings with lawyers, meetings with adoption agents, meetings with grocery store managers, and meetings with fertility doctors”
Ted 2 - I feel like Seth MacFarlane is a comedian who had about forty minutes worth of quality material and went up on stage to do his set and just never stopped talking. Anything funny he had to say he said decades ago and now you’re just watching a pathetic performer who refuses to leave. It’s the same thing over and over again and if it gets you to laugh it’s only because it strikes some distant memory of when this kind of content was actually original.
Now with Ted 2 / Family Guy 435, MacFarlane isn’t actually trying to create new comedy as much as he is trying to encourage you to get really high before you watch anything he’s created. 95% of his flat jokes are obviously so to anyone who is lucid. Consequently, Ted 2 is pathetic in more ways than one.
There is a central plot. Ted, the talking teddy bear, has been declared property and needs to win his humanity in a courtroom. It’s an extremely simple and not terribly interesting premise, slowly and poorly developed. The whole thing could be summarized as such: Ted hires a lawyer, loses case, drives to find a better lawyer, wins appeal. The better lawyer is Morgan Freeman who, just as Amanda Seyfried did, compares Ted to black slaves or blacks pre-Civil Rights, a potently disturbing metaphor that reminds me of the psychotic Vox article about making animals US citizens. (see what I'm talking about here)
“overt bullying and simplistic meanness”
It’s like the film really wants to ask deep questions about the nature of humanity, but surprisingly those questions aren’t meaningfully explored by writers who think there is inherent comedy in a bunch of assholes on a roof throwing apples at joggers. Is Ted a person? No, he’s a sentient teddy bear. I’m far more curious why he’s smoking pot and eating ice cream if he’s biologically a teddy bear than I am about absurd legal rulings. Thus everything to do with the central plot is boring.
The rest of the film is varying degrees of stupid. Mostly there are jokes about porn, penises, pot, poop, and other p-subject matter funny only for those going through puberty. The amount of overt bullying and simplistic meanness is disturbing as is the acceptance of general destruction and mayhem. It is a no-accountability comedy through and through. No one’s going to have to pay damages to Comic-con or actually extract the car from the barn Ted drives it into. I laughed a few times. One Family Guy-style non sequitur is really great: the one where they shout sad suggestions to the guys doing improv. But none of the comedy makes the film worth the two hour slog.
What really annoyed me though was that I kept coming up with simple adjustments to the plot that could have made this bad film funnier and more engaging. It’s a sequel to a garbage movie about a talking teddy bear. It should have been scrapped entirely (much like Mark Wahlberg’s role, being as he was nonessential to everything that happened), but they could have done something with it. If Ted is declared property but has no legal owner, any damage he causes is tantamount to natural disaster. He won’t be held accountable in the same way you can’t sue a tornado. So why didn’t he wreak havoc via a bunch of pranks fitting to his character and judgmental view of the world? The film still would have been trash, but it would have been more fun than watching a teddy bear have meetings with lawyers, meetings with adoption agents, meetings with grocery store managers, and meetings with fertility doctors.
And now I’ve used up some mental energy thinking about how to improve Ted 2. Bummer.