'Ted'

By Bob Garver

I can­not imag­ine that “Ted” is going to win many peo­ple over. There is an audi­ence for this movie, and they may like it, but they know who they are. What I have a hard time pic­tur­ing is peo­ple with bet­ter taste say­ing, “I’m sure glad I took a chance on that foul-mouthed teddy bear movie”. If you’ve seen the ads and you think “Ted” looks too dumb for you, you’re right. If you’re okay with “Ted” being a dumb movie and you want to see it any­way, chances are you still won’t like it.

For the record, I actu­ally am the audi­ence for “Ted”. I’m a big fan of star/director Seth MacFarlane’s ani­mated shows “Fam­ily Guy”, “Amer­i­can Dad”, and the under­ap­pre­ci­ated “Cleve­land Show”. I look for­ward to the Sun­days where all three have new episodes and I can watch them in a marathon. I’ve always loved how Mac­Far­lane inserts com­pletely ran­dom cut­away gags into his episodes so they veer off from the main sto­ry­line at the drop of a hat. I also think it’s funny when he makes chil­dren and ani­mals act like crude adults.

Which brings me to Ted, a stuffed bear voiced by Mac­Far­lane. Ted was given to John (Mark Wahlberg) when the boy was just eight. Not hav­ing any human friends, John made a spe­cial Christ­mas wish for Ted to come to life, which he did. Now both are all grown up, though nei­ther is what you’d call “mature”. John is in a rela­tion­ship with Lori (Mila Kunis). Lori shares John’s affec­tion, but wishes he would do more with his life than party with Ted all the time. She tries to get John to grad­u­ally break his attach­ment to Ted, but the child­hood bond is the one thing in life that John takes seriously.

A lot of the film’s humor is based on the idea of Ted drink­ing, cussing, and oth­er­wise act­ing obnox­ious and imma­ture. It’s not a humor that can sus­tain itself for a hun­dred min­utes, though it is pretty funny to see Ted and John get into a fist­fight late in the film. Other gags include played-out jokes about anatomy, bod­ily func­tions, stereo­types, and sex acts. Also, pro­fan­ity is used as a punch­line an awful lot. The char­ac­ters will throw a swear word into the mid­dle of a sen­tence (or in some cases the mid­dle of a word) and we’re sup­posed to laugh. It’s another type of gag that would be funny in small doses, but is annoy­ingly overused.

MacFarlane’s humor doesn’t trans­late well into live action. I think it’s because he doesn’t have the time or bud­get to change the set­ting as often as he needs to, and as a result the pace is thrown out of whack. It also severely lim­its the num­ber of cut­away gags he can do. He tries to make up for it with cameos from Ryan Reynolds, Tom Sker­ritt, Norah Jones, and Sam “Flash Gor­don” Jones (sur­pris­ingly it’s del­i­cate singer Norah Jones who’s the fun­ni­est). Appar­ently the idea is to write bit parts for ran­dom celebri­ties into the story instead of ref­er­enc­ing them out of the blue. It sounds like a decent com­pro­mise, but a lot gets lost in the translation.

“Ted” gets weird toward the end when it for­gets to be a dumb com­edy and goes for an ill-advised emo­tional punch. It’s a bad deci­sion that has also marred the last few sea­sons of MacFarlane’s “Fam­ily Guy”. But if “Ted” wants to get sappy, I can get sappy too. My favorite stuffed ani­mal from child­hood was a pink and pur­ple bear that my dad won play­ing Skee-ball at Her­shey­park. I named him Cud­dly­like because he was cud­dly and every­body liked him. I don’t care much for “Ted”, but at least it does the good deed of get­ting me nos­tal­gic. Hope­fully you’ll be inspired to rem­i­nisce about your old toys as well.

One and a Half Stars out of Five. “Ted” is rated R for crude and sex­ual con­tent, per­va­sive lan­guage, and some drug use. Its run­ning time is 106 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jul 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.