Ted 2
I keep going back to Seth McFarlane in the vain hope he might return to his glory days as a witty, subversive comedy voice. That's my main justification for watching Ted 2 this afternoon.
Ted (McFarlane) and Tammi-Lynn (Jessica Barth) plan to have a baby. When pursuing adoption, a background check sets off a chain of events that lead to the government declaring that the titular teddy bear is property and has no rights. With the help of Ted's old friend John (Mark Wahlberg) and trainee lawyer Samantha Jackson (Amanda Seyfried), they set out to prove that he should be recognised by law as a human.
I enjoyed this more than I thought I was going to. The characters are poorly drawn and the movie's attempts to get us to care about them are always going to be futile. So Ted 2 stands solely on the quality of its jokes, continuing the scattershot approach of the first film. I pretty much hated the first half hour*, with peculiar cameos from Tom Brady and Jay Leno (the former involved in some particularly unedifying and unfunny business). A scene in which John ends up covered in semen at a sperm bank was laughed up by the teenagers around me as though it wasn't the glaringly obvious outcome of the scene's premise. Unexpectedly, I found myself strangely warming to the film as it headed into the second hour.
It pretty much goes without saying that if you're not a fan of coarse, offensive, dumb humour than this isn't the film for you. It is also almost certainly sexist, homophobic and transphobic (I must admit I wasn't sure on whose part to be offended by the line "There's no such thing as chicks with dicks, just guys with tits"). I liked the first scene with Morgan Freeman's lawyer character that hinted at a smidge of self-awareness about the whole enterprise, noting that the public were unlikely to warm to Ted as he was a dislikeable character who hadn't made any great contribution to society ("You're basically Justin Bieber").
I laughed a few times, particularly tickled by a stupid running gag about "black cocks" and Samantha's complete ignorance of pop culture. There's also a handful of decent physical gags, culminating in the highlight of the movie, a downright ludicrous brawl at Comicon in New York (nice to see a brief shot of Coheed and Cambria's "Amory Wars" stand too). Giovanni Ribisi reprises Ted's nemesis Donny from the first film, capturing the character's downright weirdness to good effect.
Seyfried and Wahlberg's characters are likeable enough and their obligatory romance feels vaguely plausible. I wanted an unchallenging couple of hours of passable entertainment from "Ted 2" and that's what I got. I don't think I could recommend it wholeheartedly but if you're in the market for a dumb comedy, you could probably do worse.
*The solitary exception was an amusingly weird cameo from Liam Neeson.
Ted (McFarlane) and Tammi-Lynn (Jessica Barth) plan to have a baby. When pursuing adoption, a background check sets off a chain of events that lead to the government declaring that the titular teddy bear is property and has no rights. With the help of Ted's old friend John (Mark Wahlberg) and trainee lawyer Samantha Jackson (Amanda Seyfried), they set out to prove that he should be recognised by law as a human.
I enjoyed this more than I thought I was going to. The characters are poorly drawn and the movie's attempts to get us to care about them are always going to be futile. So Ted 2 stands solely on the quality of its jokes, continuing the scattershot approach of the first film. I pretty much hated the first half hour*, with peculiar cameos from Tom Brady and Jay Leno (the former involved in some particularly unedifying and unfunny business). A scene in which John ends up covered in semen at a sperm bank was laughed up by the teenagers around me as though it wasn't the glaringly obvious outcome of the scene's premise. Unexpectedly, I found myself strangely warming to the film as it headed into the second hour.
It pretty much goes without saying that if you're not a fan of coarse, offensive, dumb humour than this isn't the film for you. It is also almost certainly sexist, homophobic and transphobic (I must admit I wasn't sure on whose part to be offended by the line "There's no such thing as chicks with dicks, just guys with tits"). I liked the first scene with Morgan Freeman's lawyer character that hinted at a smidge of self-awareness about the whole enterprise, noting that the public were unlikely to warm to Ted as he was a dislikeable character who hadn't made any great contribution to society ("You're basically Justin Bieber").
I laughed a few times, particularly tickled by a stupid running gag about "black cocks" and Samantha's complete ignorance of pop culture. There's also a handful of decent physical gags, culminating in the highlight of the movie, a downright ludicrous brawl at Comicon in New York (nice to see a brief shot of Coheed and Cambria's "Amory Wars" stand too). Giovanni Ribisi reprises Ted's nemesis Donny from the first film, capturing the character's downright weirdness to good effect.
Seyfried and Wahlberg's characters are likeable enough and their obligatory romance feels vaguely plausible. I wanted an unchallenging couple of hours of passable entertainment from "Ted 2" and that's what I got. I don't think I could recommend it wholeheartedly but if you're in the market for a dumb comedy, you could probably do worse.
*The solitary exception was an amusingly weird cameo from Liam Neeson.
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